day 29, May 22nd

The Saufleys to close to road 6N05, about 10 miles

Rain or no rain or the Milk Gallon Challange

Today we almost stayed another day at Hiker Heaven. It rained the whole morning, so who wants to start in wet weather anyway? Nobody. So basically the whole gang hung out.

Thor and Heike took care of the morning entertainment. Both of them competed against each other in the Milk Gallon Challange. Is this the beginning of a new trail tradition? We will see. At 9a.m. they filled their glasses. Everyone else was around to watch. The rules were that they had to down almost 4 liters of milk in one hour and to at least keep it down for 10 more minutes. Sounds easy? Well, the first half hour went by, both were brave although Thor, who can eat a lot (last night he ate a two pounds steak and a big potato with cream cheese), showed signs of uneasyness. For the second half hour the complete hiker gang moved outside where there were two buckets prepared for just in case. Soon after Thor gave up and no encouraging from the croud helped.
Heike took the lead, emptied the last drop of milk into her glass, drank a third of it only 7 minutes before the hour. Everybody watched fascinated, took numerous pictures and filmed. …and then she did the mistake to sit down…her stomach was squeezed and she couldn’t keep it down any more. Some had waited to see just that.
Well, the dogs cleared up the mess. I had hoped that she would make it, she would have won 200 $ and besides it would have been a woman to win a food contest. But hey, she had actually almost drunk the whole thing so she is some sort of winner nevertheless. It’s probably that mainly hikers do come up with this sort of ideas
because after a certain stage you start to only think about food. Carsten says that he eats more now, I do so, too, but my mind doesn’t circle only around food yet.

The rain didn’t stop and Carsten preferred to stay at the Saufleys‘ for one more day which is easy to understand. It is not easy to leave. I would have preferred to go on (and spare the time for a day off some other time, although I truely enjoyed Hiker Heaven) but I’m like a cat, I don’t like to get wet so I accepted (gladly) and went to take a nap.

But then the weather changed and Carsten woke me up excitedely if I’d like to go. So that’s why we camp on a ridge around 10 miles away from the Saufleys. By the way the weather this afternoon has been very hilkerfriendly, very cool. This strech is otherwise very hot according to the guidebook. If there are misspellings it’s because my fingers are icecold by now.

By the way we bounced the dawnjackets to Kennedy Meadows and sent some stuff home so our packs are again lighter. We also put some items into the hiker box. Again and again we try to lighten up the load.

One more thing, last night Donna and Jeff told us the story how they began to host hikers. We all gathered in the trailer-it was too cold outside-and they said they had never had a better prepared group. It was a such funny story and I laughed teares, everybody was laughing hard. Carsten filmed it.

The highest number of hikers they hosted at the same time was 55! And they’ve already had over 2000 hikers.

My fingers are too stiff by now.

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