We made it to Maine! Still haven’t gotten to the start of the trail yet but that’ll happen first thing tomorrow morning.
Today has been a long exhausting day of travel. Neither of us slept well during our red eye flight last night to NYC. I was worried about our 3 hour transfer from JFK to LaGuardia but we nailed it – quick off the plane and almost first through customs. Our bags were almost first off the plane and we were in a taxi 30 minutes after our plane landed.
We got to Bangor, Maine by noon, sent some extra gear off from the post office to Judy (Megan’s 2nd cousin who lives in Virginia and is very kindly helping us out). Then we wandered around looking for the bus stop that leads to the next closest town to the trailhead, but instead we were recognized in the street by a past AT hiker who got us pointed in the right direction (and to a much needed coffee).
We ended up walking an hour across town to get there and to buy groceries for the next two weeks. I realized how tired I was when I could barely sort through it, counting things into groups for different food caches.
We eventually caught the bus to a smaller town where we met up with a ride to the AT Lodge. Turns out there were 7? Hikers on the bus so we had a full house on our way over to the Lodge. We meet some hikers and did our last minute packing.
Megan hasn’t slept well in days, she figures she’s on 6 hours of sleep in the last 2 days. We have another early start tomorrow, as the Lodge is delivering us to the base of Mt
Katadhin at 6:30am.