Day 31
Birthday hiker trash food: corn chips, squeeze cheese, fried onions
Location: Paul Schoch Memorial Campsite
Distance: 20 miles
Weather: warm and sunny
Mood: celebratory
Today is a special day, it's Dad's 60th birthday! I'm so grateful that he chose to spend the first weeks of his retirement and a big milestone birthday with me. I think I am pretty cool for doing this trip at 32, but it's undeniably way cooler to be doing it at 60, and it's clear from the reactions of the other people we meet on the trail that they think so too. One example comes to mind of someone we met up near Silver Bay in Minnesota, who was working on section hiking the whole SHT. I had been walking a little ahead and met him first. When Dad walked up his eyes lit up and said, "it's awesome to see you guys doing this, especially to see Dad doing this!". The same sort of reaction has happened all over the trail. And we've met so many hikers in their 50s, 60s, and 70s taking on big adventures and crushing miles during the week while the rest of us are at work. It's inspiring to see them out here, and makes me hopeful that many more adventures are in my future too.
We changed our schedule for the next few days as we got some some better campsite info from members of the Chequamegon Chapter of the NCT (thank you!) and ended up with 20.3 miles on the docket today. (To those who Dad texted saying I made him hike 20 miles on his birthday: it's true but I asked him first!) Since we had a more or less even mileage dividing into his age, I said he should tell me a story at every mile for a 3 year period of his life, starting in 1965 and ending in 2025. He told some stories I knew, some I hadn't heard before. How we was scared of the TV show Sir Graves Ghastly as a little kid, how he and his brothers raised animals and bugs in the house, how he met my mom and got married, how his parents died. By the afternoon we entered years I remembered and by mile 20 we had made it to the present. We spent the last 0.3 miles into camp talking about the future and what he hopes to do next as he enters this new phase of his life. It was a wonderful day and the miles disappeared quickly, like the the present slipping into the past. But there's plenty of trail ahead, and I'm glad we are hiking it together.