Stage 5: 10/24/10

She Says:  It was cold and rainy.  I was cold and wet.  This run sucked.  I sucked.  Except we did see some moose turds.  That was cool.

Oh yeah – one more thing --   I ate a cider donut at the car when we were finished.  That was cool.

And oh yeah – one other really cool thing.  Steve let me whine the entire time. 

 P.S. See my smile in the picture?  It’s photoshopped.

He says:  It’s been 5 months and 20 days since our last post and unfortunately this one was not as fun as the 1^st four.  Way back in May after our great trail run we had planned the next leg to be another trail run around Stratton mountain on forest road (FR) 320 but somehow with golf, gardening, me having to re-qualify for Boston (E did easily at Boston but I didn’t so had to do a fall Mthon – Hartford 2 weeks ago in a BQ time!) we didn’t get around to our next run Vt leg.  Once Hartford was over we decided this would be the weekend.  The little issue of the weather was not about to hold us back.  Just because weather.com said 45 and chance of showers in Vt it was nice at our house at 1100 feet in Mass. so we decided to head out.

At the trailhead it was 41 and actually showering but we were there so headed out.  E was not feeling great plus the “trail” was not as pretty as we had hoped.  Forest Roads in Vt really mean snowmobile trails which are maintained by local snowmobile clubs.  I guess FR 320 is really a snowmobile highway in the winter as they had recently taken a bush hog and chopped all the shrubs/trees along the trail to make a 30 ft wide path.  However, the snow was not there yet so all the branches on the trail were quite hazardous plus the “showers” had created some streams on the trail.  Needless to say the run was cold, wet, and not all that pretty.  We did get some views of some beautiful beaver ponds and a few pretty streams.  However, the most “exciting” item was a pile of moose scat which precipated the discussion of:  E: “What’s that”, S: “That’s moose shit”, E: “I thought moose shit looked like cow shit”, S: “I don’t think so but we’ll have to google that.”  Perhaps this was so interesting because we were freezing and feeling like shit ourselves.  Anyway, as my credibility is occasionally doubted I am happy to report that you can view piles of moose shit on google and that is exactly what we saw!

 

Anyway, we did manage to cover 9.5 miles on the snowmobile highway, 2 miles on dirt roads and another 1+ miles on Vt Route 30 to reach Winhall Vt town hall where we had left our 2^nd car.  A warm heater and seat plus the excellent mocha Lizzy had packed almost completely warmed us up.  I hate to admit it but for me the most fun part of the run was blasting some tunes and thinking back on legs 1-4 as I drove home over a lot of the 65 plus miles we had traveled during those magical runs.

I think we as olde farts have decided we love our treck but from now on we will be fair weather runners.  The advantages of age!!!