We walk 5 miles into the small village of West Hartford and settle in at the Village Deli/General Store which is serving breakfast and is really busy. As we eat, everyone from the shelter last night arrive to have breakfast. We meet up with Wallflower who we have not seen since Virginia.
There is a sense of anticipation as we hike through the woods with the tall firs, as town gets closer. The first town is Norwich - there is a house with an esky at the front gate with watermelon slices and fruit cake for hikers. We love you Norwich! Then a car chases us down the street to give us a bag of freshly picked blueberries. Yum. We eat as we walk. and feel really special. We cross the bridge and leave Vermont and enter New Hampshire and the town of Hanover, the home town of Bill Bryson, who first introduced us to the AT with his book ' A Walk in the Woods'.
This is a university town for Dartmouth College. Accommodation is really expensive. We arrange to stay in a caravan with a family who come to town to pick us up - they are 6 miles out. We leave our packs at the Dartmouth Outdoor Centre, and wander around town and eat pizza then Ralph picks us up at 6.00pm and takes us back to 'Tiggers Treehouse'. This turns out to be an interesting experience. We sleep in a Winnebago - two nights in this space is enough for Digby and I to decide that we do not want to spend long periods travelling in a a caravan. Karen has 5 dogs - she is a very kind lady but has no idea how to make the dogs obey her. We will always think of 'barking dogs' as the main memory of Tiggers.
This is Sunday and we tally up how much distance we have covered for the last week - a total of 105.8 miles with a daily average of 15.1 miles. We are very pleased with our progress and think that we are still on target to complete the hike within our visa time which expires on September 30 - 6 weeks to go and 400 miles still to cover - and those 400 miles are renowned as some of the hardest on the whole trail.
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