I had a tendency to lose track of what I wrote in my journal and what I sent home by text message or phone, and the portion of the journal I wrote after my June break still hasn't been put on the internet, so there seems to have been some confusion about circumstances in the last few weeks I spent on the trail.
I ended up off the trail for an aggregate of over a month between my
start date and the end of June, with three weeks of that coming in June
as my muse and I acquired an apartment in the Bronx and moved in and I
registered for school and got some details associated with that taken
care of. By the time I made it back to the trail, just south of the
New York / Connecticut state line, it was finally clear to me that I
wouldn't be finishing the trail this year. Over the course of the next
couple days I decided that I would 1) slow down and make a point of
going off the trail to see towns, sights and the like nearby, and 2)
quit when I got to Hanover, NH, at which point I would return to New
York to spend time reading and relaxing and trying to organize some of
the detritus I've built up over the past fifteen years. (In the past
week I threw out several papers from college. Oh, Steve, you remember
that letter I sent you from Holland, MI, 14 years ago? I have a copy!
I didn't throw that out.)
I was in quite good health a couple days before I got to Hanover, and
though I get a pretty bad blister on one of my heels, that wasn't what
caused me to stop at that point; it was almost entirely a cost-benefit
analysis that had awarded a large discrete bonus to completing the
whole trail, and the decision, it its absence, that I had other
priorities of greater importance than doing more of the trail than I
did. I ultimately enjoyed the last 300 miles, and I wanted to do it in
part because it included the 1000 mile mark, the half-way mark, and,
near the very end, the all-but-1000 miles mark. (The trail is 2176.2
miles long according to the source I ultimately used as my definitive
source, so that that last mark was 176.2 miles after the 1000 mile
mark, 41 miles before I got to Hanover.) Mid-July also, though, seemed
to me to leave about the right amount of post-backpacking summer.
I have an affection for pen and paper and put a higher priority on
writing up "the rest" of my journal than on publishing more of my
journal on the web, though the principle of revealed preference would
suggest that the priority isn't all that high for either. I should
maybe bump it up before my memories fade.
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