Tracy had noticed last night that there was a trailer and large canopy tent set up near the general store by a trail angel named Dr Sole. Not only does he take care of people's feet, more importantly for Tracy, he serves morning coffee. So after a great sleep using our newly arrived super light-weight blow-up Neo Air mattresses, Tracy bombed it to Dr Soles.
When I got there she was next in line for foot treatment. The next hour and a half, her feet were poked, scraped, taped and massaged; Tracy described this as the most relaxed she has been since leaving Scotland.
Unfortunately, the rest of the day was quite the opposite. If you don't already know this, Tracy is all about laundry. She cares deeply about using the right soap powder, the temperature of the water and so on. Some may say a little too much... Yet on this trip she has really let go and just cares about getting it done, obviously with certain items such as socks getting a "triple pre-wash" before they go anywhere near the regular laundry.
There was one washing machine and 60 hikers. There was a sign up list. When she mentioned the list at Dr Soles place the guy in the treatment chair looked interested. She volunteered to go sign him up. Later, Tracy discovered people were line jumping the laundry list, even the guy she signed up bumped her off. Tracy told me later she then scratched off the name of a random person near the top of list and replaced it with her own. Then she had to practically sit on the washing machine to fight off intruders.
Along with the laundry stress, we also had to look through our gear, decide what to throw away/send home/put in the hikers box, sort maps and buy supplemental food. We also had chores to do that required computer access, but there were just three intermittently-working solar-powered computers and the chairs were almost permanently occupied. Half the tasks we needed to accomplish needed to be done at the general store, where the post office and laundry were, and the others needed to be done at Tom's Place, computers, collect bear canisters, fill water bladders. Throughout the day we must have made about 20 trips back and forth between these two places which were about eighth of a mile apart. Meanwhile, Tracy had to find out a way to print out return labels for REI shoes. The post office was about to shut. Blah, blah, blah thought I'd broken the iPhone. We had barely eaten all day.
By 6pm we had done most of our tasks and celebrated over a pint of Cherry Garcia ice-cream on the front porch of the general store.
Dr Sole had invited us along with other hikers to have spaghetti dinner. My appetite was strong enough at this point that it did not concern me that we were about to eat spaghetti in a place so recently covered in feet. Dr Soles wife had made the sauce and it was a nice way to end the day.
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