Epic day! I’m glad to say my pad held air last night. Hope it holds this time. Someone was shooting off fireworks down the road until 10pm so it made it pretty rough getting up at 5am. Still, I got going and am continuing to hike with Sparkle. We plan to stick together for The White Mountains, at least. She gets going faster in the morning but I’m faster hiking so I catch up. We have the same sense of humor and seem to think alike. She’s just a sweetheart and it’s nice to actually have someone to share experiences with and to help take pictures of each other. On the way up to Mt. Moosilauke we passed the 1,800 mile mark. Man, that makes me so happy! The climb up going North was tough but was really beautiful and actually quite enjoyable. The weather couldn’t have been better. Climbing the summit just had me tearing up. You got day hikers passing you with barely a pack on their back if anything but here we are, with happy tears, because we are carrying our full packs and the knowledge that we walked here from Georgia. There are half domes of rock at the summit where we could duck down out of the cold wind and have lunch. I feel so lucky that we had the views we had. Just the day before, the whole mountain was in the clouds. The walk down the North side was insane. The elevation chart on my Relive video makes the whole day look gradual. It wasn’t! It was seriously steep with even wooden steps bolted to the rock. It was taking us over 45 minutes to do a mile! I fell and landed on my butt or backpack twice. After that, we got to the parking lot at Kinsman Notch and talked to two day hikers for a bit then asked if they wouldn’t mind driving us to the hostel. Luckily they were going that way so it worked. Guess I just technically hitched! LOL! The hostel has free shuttles but we’d have to wait 2.5 hours for the next one. Having these guys drive us was a big blessing allowing us to get cleaned up and work on our upcoming plans before others showed up. I’m fully resupplied with way too much food but don’t know what to expect for the upcoming sections. We are set to go to Gorham as our next town stop but that is currently looking like Saturday and all the hotels are booked. Don’t know what to do. We will just catch a shuttle in to resupply and see if we can camp in the yard at a hostel there. We are set to go back to Gorham two days later and I already booked a hotel with 2 king beds for us to split the cost. Before that though, we have some of the most amazing mountain climbs ahead of us.