colleen stinchcombe

July 19

I dream that I’m peeing and then wake up to find that I am, indeed, peeing – all over myself. It’s 1:30 am. I crawl out of my tent and clean myself up in the bathroom, rinsing out my sleep pants. Cool, body.
I fall back asleep quickly but morning still comes too quickly and I hit snooze on my alarm several times. We want to get going early because we’ve planned for 15 miles. But as we eat breakfast, Dexter says her knee isn’t feeling good and I say that we haven’t done laundry in a while and also there is a tunnel coming up that the OCT association highly recommends not walking, and we begin to realize we won’t be hiking very far before hitching.
We set out, but the trail we’re supposed to take has a “closed for bridge repair” sign. We’re going to take the road when we realize the sign is from October. Surely it doesn’t take that long to replace a bridge…? I decide we should risk it – at worse we’ll have to turn around and it will have added 2 miles to our day. Instead, we find a perfectly intact bridge except for one board on the railing. 
We get to the light house and then walk down to the beach. Energizer Bunny and Dexter sit down and I start trying to ask for a ride. 

I strike up a conversation with an older couple and they say they’d be happy to take us to Florence in the back of their truck. Awesome! They go explore the beach for a while and when they come back we hop in. 
They drop us off at the post office. Energizer Bunny and Dexter get their packages and then we get Chinese Food and do laundry and go to camp. But I’ve been feeling tired and antisocial. Between being chatty with hitches and the socialization that comes with mostly hiking as a group, I’ve used up a lot of my extroversion. I walk around town by myself and download a book of poems and sit in the gazebo and write. I sit with Energizer Bunny and Dexter and we watch a man flying a remote control plane around – it’s the same man from the couple who gave us a hitch.
Just before dark, I go to the bathroom and start walking toward my tent. But then I notice the sunset over the water and start exploring a little, and I come upon a little sandy area with a gorgeous view and I just sit there and take it in. It is nice to be somewhere beautiful, by myself, with nowhere in particular to be.