Day 22

Day 22
1.5 miles hiked

Today I hiked just 1.5 miles to get to the top of Mission Creek Trailhead and because my pad has been deflating every night since being back on trail and I have not slept good at all.
I decided to hitch from there and skip the next little part of trail so I can get to town sooner. Sleeping on that pad one more night would be absolutely terrible. I needed to get a new one before I got back to trail. 

I ran into Emily a.k.a. Hawkeye on the climb up to Mission Creek Trailhead and told her my plan and she decided to join me. When we got to the trailhead she relayed the message to her tramily and 3 out of 4 of them decided to come with us as they were also struggling. 

I randomly saw a truck driving up the mountain towards us so I ran like a madman to go and catch them before they drove by. The man agreed to drive us down the hill after he was finished his work that would take about 45 mins. We were so grateful for this ride.
I then texted Kenny from my garmin who is the trail angel and asked if he had space for four people that night and he did so we decided to stay there. Once we got dropped off a few blocks before his house we walked the rest of the way.
When we arrived we were pleased to see that he still had breakfast going on so we got to eat a nice home cooked meal.

After a couple hours of rest at Kenny's we got a ride from him into town to eat some more food and explore the village of Big Bear. I needed to find a new pad to sleep on and maybe some new shorts to help prevent some of my chaffing.

I hung out with Scratch and Hawkeye while Jennifer went to resupply. We ate lunch at the Fire Rock Cafe. It was the best live music, burger and mac & cheese I’ve heard on trail to date.
I also found my new pad but unfortunately did not find any shorts despite my best effort’s.

After our town exploring I found us a hitchhike from a spartan racer to bring us back to the store where everyone else was after resupplying and waited for a ride back to Kenny’s place.

We decided to get a taxi ride and split it between the four of us to Kenny’s place because there were four other hikers who called him ahead of us so we would’ve had to wait longer and we didn't want to wait anymore. 

Two spartan racers stayed at Kenny’s place with his air bnb’s at the house as well as 20 other hikers staying overnight. It was a full house. 
We played the run game of “let’s get Alyssa to guess all 50 states” 
I did pretty good and got about 30 of them on my own before they had to start giving me guesses. I got 49 before I finally couldn't think of the last one. Vermont is the state I missed. 

I decided to go into the hot tub too tonight and that was wonderful for my muscles to relax. 
Trying to sleep now (sharing a bed with Hawkeye) but there are some hikers who are snoring a lot and it's hard to sleep.