Quoi and I intended to get back on the trail today, but it didn’t happen, and our feet thanked us very much for it.
We woke up late, and hung out in the teepee, and then inside Jennifer and Mark’s house until nearly 11 am (toasting and eating nearly all of their bread, after Mark offered), before heading out for all-you-can-eat pizza.
We spent several hours at Round Table Pizza (which had a notable lack of round tables), munching on their pizza and salad buffet (and free WiFi).
Quoi’s boyfriend will be joining us later than anticipated: he should now be joining us on July 14th, after a job interview for a firefighter position in Washington state. (He asked whether he should try to hitch to the trail in his suit.)
After the all-you-can-eat buffet closed, we went to the Safeway a few doors down to resupply. We’re planning four days to Chester (where we’ll get four more days of food to go to the Burney Mountain Guest Ranch). We’re sending another four days to the ranch to get us to (the town of) Mount Shasta.
We were disappointed by the Safeway’s snack selection: they didn’t have any Clif Bar flavors I liked (rather, they had only flavors I didn’t like), nor half of the snacks that Quoi wanted, and we had to improvise with less desirable snacks.
We returned to Jennifer and Mark’s house to repack our food, and then went to the post office to mail it off. We also opened my bounce box, repacked it into a larger box, and put more stuff in it. (The two of us have nearly 8.5 pounds of stuff in the box between what was already there and what we added.) The bounce box is going to the Mount Shasta Post Office, so we can opt to forward it along for free if we don’t need to open it.
We again returned to Jennifer and Mark’s house, and finished packing to leave town. We were hot and exhausted, even though we hadn’t really done that much today, and we finished our chores with the post office visit after 5 pm.
Now late in the day, our plan to get dinner and hitch out of town seemed unlikely to work. Jennifer said it was unlikely that we’d get a ride out of town so late, and that we could stay in the teepee again if we needed and leave town tomorrow morning, when changes of getting a ride would be higher.
The first restaurant we intended to go to was closed, so we instead went to Moon’s, an Italian restaurant. After our meal (which I thought was good, and Quoi didn’t like) and dessert, we decided that it was too late to get a ride back to the trail (and then hike to a campsite), so I asked the bartender about the amount of traffic in the morning, so we could gauge when we should get up to try and get a ride back to the trail.
Our waiter, Samuel, offered to give us a ride back to the trailhead tomorrow, at any time in the morning we wanted. He had just gotten a new car, and really likes driving it. Grateful for the assistance, we exchanged phone numbers, and said we’d call him in the morning.
Our transportation problem for tomorrow solved, we returned to the teepee, and drifted off to sleep.