Jammin' with Jameson

8 miles. We got up and got to work with our chores before catching the bus back to Independence at 1. First stop was Schats Bakery which was overwhelming with so much good food to pick from but ended up being excellent. I got dutch crunch rolls, M&M cookies, and two sandwiches for trail and canoli and cinnamon roll for breakfast. Afterward I headed to dollar tree with Alchemist and Weather Man to resupply and somehow scrambled together enough meals from their meager options. I really wanted to push myself to have more fun food and get away from bars, peanut butter, and trailmix. A basket stuffed with food ended up being $65. Most importantly I ditched my pair of duct tape insole camp shoes and got a pair of flip flops. I realized that I wouldn’t be able to go to the post office to forward my new shoes because it was Juneteenth so I asked Slay to send it ahead for me and had to run to hand them off to her after I passed her on the street. After that I had an hour free to do my last chore – go bouldering at the climbing gym!!! I met a burnt out LA hippie named Seth who was an insanely good climber and taught me a few new things. I didn’t have much time but it felt so good to climb again. I walked as fast as I could with my insanely heavy bear can in hand to the bus a mile away and ran into Sticky, Breezy, and Update who had to come up for a dentist appointment for Sticky – turned out her wisdom teeth coming in was the source of what was bothering her. On the bus ride we heard from alchemist that there were supposed to be thunder storms rolling in in 2 days that we’d have to prepare for. We got a ride from an awesome woman up to the trailhead and after some stretching headed up the 5 mile climb. It felt much much longer going up than coming down but I caught up with boogie as we got to the top and saw the boys scrambling on the rocks at the top of Kearsarge. Alchemist and Lightning had to stay behind were going to try to get to the trail by late afternoon so we just wanted to get back to the main trail and camp for the night. We stopped at the lake and took a lovely dip while enjoying many of our fresh bakery goods. Because the two girls weren’t with us, we had an abundance of food to eat through that wouldn’t fit in our bear can. Not a bad problem to have. We got to a flat but dusty spot for camp and proceeded to hear a terrible story from Boogie that gave her the fit of giggles – one of those gotta be there stories. It ended up causing me to think about the story of Tapper’s reply to Veto’s “Tapper… I’ve never met her” joke and make me hysterically laugh for 5 minutes straight and fall down onto my Tyvek crying of laughter. After I was finally composed, I drew the McMansion hangout sesh on Boogies tyvek and a little drawing of lil grogu and headed to sleep.