We spent a good deal of time lounging around town today. I grabbed some mochas for us and a breakfast burrito at a little coffee shop near the hotel. We hung out in the hotel until checkout at 11:00AM. I needed a gas canister for my stove and was worried I wouldn’t be able to find one in town, as there is no outdoor store here. I tried texting Yote and 2.Toe (who are across the river on the Oregon side, in Cascade Locks) to see if they could find any gas canisters there, but my phone was not sending/receiving texts. I checked out the hardware store near our hotel on a whim and was excited to discover they sold gas canisters! Unfortunately they only had the large size (I usually get the small ones), which will add quite a bit of extra weight, but perhaps it will last me until the end of the trail.
Tofu was more efficient than Wolf Bird and I and she set off to Walking Man Brewery to hang out and wait for us to finish up our chores. Wolf Bird and I stopped by the library to catch up on some blogging. He then went to meet Tofu at the brewery while I headed to the grocery store as I hadn’t resupplied yet. I got the food I’d need for this next section and also sneakily bought a couple things for Wolf Bird’s birthday (coming up on 9/4), as I didn’t think I’d encounter another fully stocked grocery store before his birthday.
Finally I headed to the brewery myself and discovered Wolf Bird and Tofu hanging out on the patio with huge flights in front of each of them! This brewery has the largest size taster glasses I’ve ever seen! When you order a flight, you get to sample 9 beers and each glass is like a mini pint. The two of them had already put in some good work on their flights. I of course had to join and ordered my own and then we all ordered some food as well. We planned to hang out here for a bit then get a hitch back to the trail mid to late afternoon and put in maybe 10ish miles before dark.
While we were hanging out, my phone (which was still acting weird and only receiving/sending every third text) shut off all of a sudden and wouldn’t turn on. Finally I got it to start up, but it got frozen on the start-up page that shows the white Apple logo. No matter what I did I couldn’t get my phone to move past that start-up screen. Ugh! Not what I wanted right before we were to head out. I could definitely get by hiking without a phone, especially since I could rely on Wolf Bird and Tofu, who both have working phones. However, I really wanted a working phone to be able to take photos of Washington, a section I’d heard is incredibly beautiful and have been looking forward to the entire trail. Also, I love having music or podcasts to listen to while hiking. Wolf Bird generously offered to basically give me his phone for the remainder of the trail but I just wanted my own phone to work.
I decided I wanted to try to get my phone working before heading out, while Tofu opted to head back to the trail as originally planned. Wolf Bird accompanied me back to the library where we tried to find a way to reset my phone. Unfortunately the library only had Chromebooks available which don’t have iTunes–and you need iTunes to reset an iPhone. I asked the librarian and the nearest phone repair place was about 30 miles away, and I also looked up the nearest Apple store, which was over an hour away in Portland, OR. Both of these would require a long hitch. Ugh!
We decided to go back to the hotel we stayed at last night, as they had a computer in the lobby. I was pretty frustrated and upset at this point, as I didn’t want to spend my time in town dealing with such a trivial problem, but also wanted a working phone. The hotel computer didn’t have iTunes on it either, and when I tried to download it, it asked for the computer’s master password. Ugh! I asked the woman at the front desk, who it turned out co-owned the hotel with her husband, and she said she’d get her husband to come out and type in the password. I was nearly in tears out of frustration and she was so incredibly kind and said it was not a big deal at all for us to basically take over their computer for hours and for us to download iTunes. Fast forward an hour or so (including Wolf Bird having to mad dash around town to find me a new charging cord) and my phone was back in business! It turned out that a software update fixed the issue. Wow, was I relieved… as well as so grateful for these kind hotel owners. They were having their own tough day–their housekeeper had a breakdown and hadn’t cleaned any of the rooms, and now they had to tell all the guests coming to check in on a Friday evening that their rooms weren’t ready yet. Yet they still helped me out and for that I am so amazed and thankful.
Finally Wolf Bird and I started hitching back to the trail. It was late in the day, around 6:00 or so. So much for making miles today. We got a hitch with a couple of friends who were maybe in their late 20s and were on some type of road trip? They were a little sketchy seeming, but they were actually nervous to pick us up since they’d never picked up hitchhikers before.
We arrived back at the trail and devoured some amazing blackberries growing alongside the road before setting off to hike about 3 miles before dark. The sun was setting and it was pretty warm out. This section was almost jungle-like with a lot of lush green undergrowth. Before long, we encountered HUGE swarms of tiny little gnats flying through the air. The air was almost thick with them and it was impossible to dodge the thousands of tiny bugs. I started walking as fast as I could with my head down to block them from getting in my eyes and nose and mouth. Ick! It was pretty miserable being all hot and sweaty and dodging gnats and walking uphill. Luckily we only had 3 miles to walk and it passed quickly and the gnats eventually died down as we approached our intended campsite.
There were a bunch of people already camped here (it was about 8:30PM and nearly totally dark now), but Wolf Bird found us a sweet secluded camp spot near a little pond. It looked like a retaining pond and we later found out that Tofu had swam in this pond that she described as super refreshing–and we thought was sort of gross! Ha! It’s all in the perspective I suppose.