The first of two belated posts:

It took me 12 days to get through New Jersey and New York, which is about 160 miles of mostly flat trail. The low mile-per-day average is partly due to a heat wave that hit us in New York and partly due to some well-deserved days off with my parents.

The New Jersey state line is in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. The town of Delaware Water Gap itself had a nice bakery where I ate a personal pan cheesecake, and an outfitter where I replaced my severely mauled trekking poles (thanks, Pennsylvania Rocks). I camped with a big group of hiking friends a handful of miles into NJ in a beautiful field. Jibitz, who I’ve been hiking with since central Virginia, had a set of portable speakers for her iPod, which necessitated a dance party after dinner. I had a good time getting to know some of the new hikers in our vicinity–Bumper and Breeze, two Temple grads and possibly the most positive people I have ever met; and WrongWay, a backpacking guide from California who hikes in Chacos.

One of the best things about New Jersey, New York and Connecticut was the so-called Deli Walk, a stretch of trail where thru-hikers can grab lunch almost every day within a mile of the trail. We hit our first stop at Kevin’s Steaks in Culvers Gap on our second day into Jersey. The bartender/owner was super nice to us hikers and fed us well. I had a delicious brownie ice cream sundae and a steak with sweet potato fries and a salad–pretty good eating after subsisting on Lipton Noodle Sides and Snickers bars for so long.

Another great stop on that stretch of trail was the Mayor’s House in Unionville, NY. The guy who runs this hiker hostel, Dick, was once the mayor of this little burg and followed his late wife’s dream of opening a place for hikers to stay. Dick wasn’t in when I stayed there, but he has a real cast of characters working for him. There’s Butch, Dick’s second-in-command, who lays down the rules for new arrivals: If you use a three-or-more-syllable word, you have to put a dollar into the cuss word jar. If you call Butch “sir,” you will be punched in the arm. If a female hiker calls Butch “sir,” he will punch the hiker closest to the offending female. You also have to put up with Bill, the seemingly ancient Korean war vet who cooks dinner and breakfast. Bill grills every hiker for about five minutes–either until they can’t take it anymore or he gets bored. I asked Bill what he would take as a trail name if he did the trail, and he said “Humperdink TigerLily,” because who would pick such a stupid name to call themselves? Basically the boys at the Mayor’s House make fun of you for doing something as ridiculous as hiking the trail from the minute you get there until you walk out the door. The one touching moment–and supposedly Dick cries every time–is when they show you this video clip of Paul Potts singing “Nessun Dorma” on a British TV show. Butch gave a long speech before playing the clip about how it was supposed to inspire us to finish our trek. I love the idea, but it was very difficult to stifle my laughter at the absurdity of the moment. I stayed up with Fynious and Hustle & Flo, two section hikers we’d met back in PA, watching “Into the Wild” before falling asleep on the couch.

The day after the Mayor’s, I booked it to a garden center to meet up with my folks who were visiting for the Fourth of July weekend. You can read my Dad’s account of the weekend (complete with pictures) here. We ate delicious meals, watched many episodes of Cash Cab, performed trail magic a few times for fellow hikers and visited my trail namesake’s hometown, Sleepy Hollow.

Our first stop on the Fourth was Sunnyside, Washington Irving’s estate. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” comes from Irving’s collection of short stories, “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.” The original volume of “The Sketch Book” was on the shelf of Irving’s study–an arm’s reach away on our tour. I chose “Ichabod” as my nom de guerre for the trail since I’m going to be getting my Master’s of Library Science this fall, but Irving’s description of the young schoolteacher is strikingly familiar:

The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock, perched upon his spindle neck, to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.

We also stopped by Lyndhurst, the gothic mansion of robber baron Jay Gould, and saw a fantastic fireworks display in Sleepy Hollow proper that night.

My parents visited during the worst of the heat wave that hit the North East this July, but it was still very hot when they dropped me off at the trailhead on the 6th. I only made it 8 miles before I more or less collapsed on top of a mountain for the night. After my night alone, I started hiking with The Crusher, a French-Canadian advertising copywriter from Montreal. You can read his blog (Google Translate might help) at 5 Millions de Pas.

Once the heat subsided, Crusher and I had some good times in New York. We stayed at the Greymoor Friary, a Franciscan monastery that lets hikers camp on their soccer pitch. We also visited Bear Mountain State Park and Zoo (the trail goes right through the zoo and hits its lowest point, 124 feet above sea level, at the bear habitat. We were discouraged to know that it was more or less all uphill from there to Katahdin. We had some good luck with trail magic in New York too–a group of trail maintainers at the RPH shelter put on a big cookout with steaks and salad, and one trail-side cooler had huge pieces of iced watermelon.

We spent our last night in the state at a garden center, camped out between the Metro-North train tracks and a very busy road. The only thing that made the night pleasant was magic from a true trail character, Paddy’O. Crusher and I met him that afternoon and he agreed to meet us that night. He made us calzones (”‘zones”), trail bombs (basically an Irish car bomb with bourbon instead of Jameson), and serenaded us with Sinatra’s “I Did it My Way,” which may have rivaled the Paul Potts video for absurd inspirational attempts. All in all, a wonderful twelve days through the Mid Atlantic and into New England.

Ichabod