Camping permitted only at designated sites

Connecticut begins with a steep uphill, but when you get to the top of that, you are at the highest point of the state. I always like hitting the high-point of a state because it tells me that the net effort that I must expend in the remainder of that state is less than the effort that I've already expended. For my computer-science readers, there's also a nice little problem there: how do you compute the set of points on the trail for which there are no higher points remaining in the state? (It turns out that you can do it with a simple extension of a problem that I had worked on before, but I won't say more than that to let you have the fun of solving it yourself.)

We walked down the mountain and stopped in a the town of Salisbury, CT for lunch and a small resupply. As we were walking into town, a northbound hiker was walking out, and he let us pick through the extra stuff that he had received in the mail. I took some Jolly Ranchers, but they were really sticky.

We walked on and arrived at Limestone Spring Lean-to, which is pretty far off the trail on a steep downhill. It's quite frustrating when this happens, because that means that you have a long uphill first thing in the morning. So Picker and I went down to the spring to gather water. We hiked a mile or so farther that evening and set up a stealth camp. As the picture ending the last post indicates, this is not strictly legal. We made sure to be quite a ways from the trail, but we worried about rangers all evening.

The next day was a bit of a long one. We decided not to camp illegally again, so we had two choices for camp sites – one about 13 miles away and one about 23 miles away. Naturally, we chose to head for the farther campsite. When we got within 3 miles, I decided that I didn't want to walk for more than another hour, so I really pushed hard to get to camp.

The next day had some nice scenery:

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-cEvLxZBiQEM/TOXAywwRf9I/AAAAAAAAAvM/SHS1g8Ih370/s800/DSCF0203.JPG

after we went over a small mountain, we got to Kent, CT. We were rather early to town, so we got breakfast at one of the posh restaurants. I had a waffle with ice cream.

As we were walking away from Kent, we met a couple walking their dog. In the course of conversation, they mentioned that they had sent their daughter to the prep school that we walked past between the trail and town. Without batting an eye, one of them said that the yearly tuition was $20000! The school had a beautiful campus, so we could now know where the funds for that came from, but it seemed excessive to me.

We crossed the border with New York, but we were soon back in Connecticut. We stopped at a campsite just past a bridge and met up with Just Jill once again. I slept with the tarp off of my hammock, which turned out to be a mistake as the weather in the small valley where we camped was extremely cold overnight.

The next morning, we would leave Connecticut for good and enter New York.

Next time

New York. Poorly-maintained trails near big roads. The lowest point on the whole AT right next to caged bears (it couldn't get much more symbolic than that).

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