June 21-26, 2017

We’ve been off trail for the last several days so that we could attend the wedding of a close friend from law school. It’s our second (and hopefully last) wedding of the PCT, and was a bit tricky to get to given that we were getting off trail in Chester, a small town in Northern California, and heading to the Adirondack mountains in northern New York. Not the most straightforward connection!

We were super lucky to be helped out by Terry. He made the 2.5 hour drive from his home in Carson City to pick us up in Chester and then took us back to his home so that we could wash up and get our stuff together. We enjoyed a day of showers (yay!), lots of laundry (including our sleeping bags and backpacks), plenty of food, and a couple naps.

The next day, Terry took us to the Reno airport for our red-eye flight to New York City (JFK). From there we rented a car to make the five-hour drive up to the Adirondacks. The next couple of days were spent catching up with friends, lots of eating and drinking, and celebrating our friend’s wedding. We cleaned up pretty well, but I seem to have no pictures from the celebrations (our friend acted as our group’s wedding photog and we haven’t tracked the pictures down yet).  

When given the option of spending the morning before the wedding canoeing or hiking, we may have pushed hard for canoeing. Who wants to go hiking anyway?

Exhausted from the wedding celebrations, we made the drive back to JFK on Sunday, waited out a flight delay, and finally arrived at the Reno airport at 2am. Terry was waiting for us! Talk about going above and beyond!

After our flight landed, I received a text message from Sean, a trail angel in Chester and blog reader. It turned out that he was in Tahoe and returning to Chester the next day. Did we want a ride? The timing couldn’t be better. Terry had planned to drive us back up to Chester but also needed to be in the Bay Area this afternoon. Sean’s offer meant that Terry saved hours of driving and we got to leave Carson City a couple hours later. A win win situation!  Those extra couple hours allowed us to do a final load of laundry and sort through our gear to decide what to bring for the next section.  We’re leaving our bear cans and extra layers behind — I’m looking forward to a lighter pack!

 Terry couldn’t have been nicer and more helpful in helping us get from the trail to our wedding celebrations. Thanks Terry!!
A few hours later, Sean picked us up and we were back on our way towards Chester. It was great to get an opportunity to chat with him about life in Chester and his activities as a trail angel these past few years. Once we got back to Chester, we spent the afternoon relaxing at Sean’s house and meeting his family and dogs. Michael especially enjoyed playing with the dogs (one of which was named Sierra just like our cat!). Sean’s wife, Kari, made a fantastic dinner. A great evening all around!

I’m not sure how we would have managed the last few days without Terry’s and Sean’s kindness and generosity. They were both a tremendous help in allowing us to pursue our PCT hike without missing a celebration that was really important to us. We’ll be back in the trail in the morning and then we’ll be schedule-free for a while!