Day 78 July 5th :)

Happy birthday Chels!! We were up early and hiked the 3.5 miles in no time, caught a ride into Sierra City within minutes and found where the hikers were in town minutes after that! 2 nice ladies had rented out an apartment above a restaurant in town (view of town from apt above) and were letting hikers stay with them! We showered, did laundry and were eating breakfast all by 9am! I called Chels (her b-day) and Gram Peg (to have her NOT mail out a package of ours) and made some muffins for breakfast. The hikers were coming in and figuring things out (the next 138.2 miles of trail are basically closed due to forest fires) So, most are hitching rides up to Chester and continuing north on the PCT, a few are walking random roads to get to Chester so they can say that they did walk from Mexico to Canada....we are already missing those 39 miles back in Idyllwild, so we'll just add these miles to the missed section and keep going north on the trail that is open. Around 4pm, we decided that instead of hanging out in this town, we would head to/try to get to Chester (pretty far by car from here), so we made a sign and stuck out our thumbs and smiled :) Our first ride was to Barretts in the back of a pickup with 2 people going biking (we were with the bikes, picture of Buttes that we'll missing hiking near in picture above), our second ride was to Graeagle with a nice couple that wasn't even going there, but went out of their way for us (thank you again Micheal, Pamela and Pippin (the pup))! As we were walking out of the festival traffic of Graeagle, a young lady on her way to Quincy drove by and picked us up! Wow, we were rolling now! She left us in Quincy (where there was a massive 4th of July 4 day music festival going on) 6pm now, we were starting to think about where we were going to spend the night when Carol and Chris walked up to us (and Chris was wearing a PCT hat!!!) and they offered us their house for the night (they were going to the festival) Wow! So, the owner of the gas station gave us a lift up the road close to their house! Wasa is here also (they found him in town earlier) and I've been on this laptop for hours updating this blog! Wasa just made some homemade gingerbread, Neighbor is sleeping on the floor and I'm about ready to do the same, what a day! Chris and Carol have offered to give us a ride to Chester tomorrow, so we'll officially be at mile 1335.8 and walk north from there. All of our maps/info are at the PO in Chester, so we might have to wait until Monday morning to actually start the walking north process, but we'll be in the right town to do it! So, 3.5 miles of walking and 5 different rides have brought us to Quincy. The smoke is thick in the air and it doesn't look like it's getting better anytime soon, so hopefully north of Chester will be better. 2008, the year of the fire......or is it always like this out here?!