A Family Adventure of the 2,185 mile hike from Georgia to Maine – 2014
We said goodbye to the Busbys and were dropped back off at the trail. We hiked several miles in the morning, then met up with my dad who came to hike with his grand kids for a few days. He joined us for our entry into Massachusetts, but he also managed to pick the day of one of the most torrential rains we’ve had to date.
His highschool friend Howie dropped him off in Falls Village, CT and joked with us about the rumble of distant thunder. A local trail angel came by to give us a heads up about the impending storms. Unperturbed, we headed off to the hills anyway. The kids enjoyed hiking with their grandfather who is a walking encyclopedia of plant knowledge. They got answered all the questions they’d had for us over the last few days.
They were excited to learn about the wasp larvae that create the bulbous oak apples that they’d been calling pow-pows after the sound they make when stomped on. The sudden rains brought flash flooding (while the flash over the photo obscures the background, the kids are actually standing on the trail with water up to their knees).
But we hiked on and the rain eventually abated. We walked a half mile off the trail to have a hot dinner of pizza and sushi at the local market in Salisbury. The mother of one of the cashiers (who was picking her son up from work) noticed how drenched we were and invited us all back to her house for the night. We took her up on the offer. The husband was a timber framer specializing in the restoration of eighteenth century buildings, and we enjoyed a dry evening with friendly folk in a rambling old carriage house.
A Family Adventure of the 2,185 mile hike from Georgia to Maine - 2014 
We were driving to Saratoga Springs from Boston, and thought of you on the Mass Pike (I-90) in western Massachusetts when we passed under a bridge which is labeled “Appalachian Trail”. That was the day of the flash floods, which were indeed quite impressive.