We have a couple miles of road walking which is a blessing and a curse. It's easy to walk fast on concrete but it completely tears the tread off your trail runners.
Even though we have a significant amount of elevation gain (about 4000 feet), we're still moving fast. The promise of Mount Greylock (our first real mountain in a long while) is a sweet reward, and I get to the top at about 4:00 PM only to find crowds of tourists walking in slow circles around what appears to be a wizard's tower.
I stand around with my phone out, obviously trying to take pictures, patiently waiting for the tourists to move out of the shot, and it never happens. It seems like they're all caught in an eternal slow motion circle pit.
Regardless, the tower looks epic.
And I take way too many pictures of it.
Including some with my only friends (Kitten and Straight Edge Man).
We loiter for awhile at the lodge nearby, and I start to notice that my stomach is acting pretty weird. Considering this is nothing new, I'm not too worried, but before I know it I'm waddling across the parking lot towards the composting privies holding my butt cheeks closed tight.
What the hell? Where'd this come from? I go through a mental checklist of all the food I've eaten today... Powerade, more powerade, a whole sleeve of gluten free cookies, hella sugar cereal, chocolate... More cookies. Holy shit, did I eat anything that wasn't 90 percent sugar? This explains why my stomach is feeling so gnarly.
On the way down the mountain and to our shelter for the night, my stomach is hurting bad and I'm having serious problems. God damnit, not this shit again (pun in-fucking-tended).
I feel so shitty by the time we get there that I barely eat dinner, gag down a few tinctures and a clove of raw garlic, and listen to the most abhorrent thruhiker in the world tell the most god awful stories in the most god awful surfer bro accent.
His name is "So Way", he carries wiffle ball bats with him to kill rodents, and thank the fucking lord he's going southbound. Me and So Way immediately get off to a bad start when he begins to brag about his sadistic practice of clubbing mice, chipmunks, even squirrels to death with his wiffle ball bats. He argues that it's the mice or him, as if mice are going to kill him by getting into his food bag and give him norovirus and therefore kill him. Or you know, you could just hang your food bag, or sleep in a tent (and not the shelter). And since when did norovirus ever kill anyone?! What is this, the god damn Oregon Trail? I've never heard of norovirus killing any thruhiker.
So Way spends the next hour talking nonstop, now telling us where to get weed up north, now asking Stevie if he gave him an egg sandwich earlier in the trail, now bragging about his hiking record, now saying he's stopped two potential armed robberies with his own guns, now blahblahblah. I feel sick to my stomach and this idiot is making me feel ten times worse.
I had planned to sleep in the shelter, but I can't stand this dumbass, so I go set up my tent in the dark and fantasize about breaking his stupid fucking wiffle ball bats in half (maybe over his head) until I pass out.
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