Hot

I'll be honest, I'm too tired to make much of a blog post tonight. It was a long, hot day. My host, or I should say, the friend of my official host, bought me bagels to eat and take with me, from the bagel shop his family once owned. My choice of cinnamon cream cheese on a veggie bagel was apparently an unusual one to him, even after working many years in a bagel shop. I'm happy to surprise. We chatted a little while I ate, then he left for work, and I went on my way.

I got out of Utica without much trouble and then was on trail most of the day. The trail's condition varied greatly throughout the day, from paved around certain towns, to crushed limestone, to dirt, to a narrow single  tire wide path at times, sometimes nice and smooth and others painfully bumpy. One section was paved and seemed like it should be nice, but it allowed snowmobiles on it, and they had utterly ruined the trail, making it far bumpier than most dirt sections. But I stuck to it most the day whatever it looked like, especially after I took my leave of it for a while and found the highway running right next to it took me up and down hills while the trail stayed flat. The trail also had shade, which for today, well...

I saw one sign that said it was 96° in the heat of the day. I would believe it. It quickly went from decent this morning to brutally hot. I met a lady tourist coming the other way (going from Maine back home to Seattle) and she was quitting early around 1pm because she said she just couldn't stand the heat. Without any promoting, she mirrored my sentiment that it takes about a week to get into stride, except that now at her age it has become two weeks.

The day was a long, hot 80+ mile slog in the brutal heat, with the threat of a thunderstorm coming that I actually hoped would be sooner than later to cool things down. It wasn't. I finally got to my hosts' a little after 5, and it wasn't until we were having dinner around 7 something that the thunderstorm finally came. It was nice. It reminded me of home. I could talk about my hosts, about their trans-American tour thirtyish years ago when it was not a common thing to do, their culinary training, their foster dogs, their daughter and grandchildren who are now here filling the house with delightful chaos... But I have two beers in me and am much too tired. It was a long, hot day, and now it is done.