Day 63: A zero day! Kinda....

August 11: Initially, I had planned to get back on the trail and keep hiking today, but I still found myself with some work to do. There were still a couple of bugs I needed to work out on Atlas Quest and some updates which needed doing on the Straw Hat Pizza website. (I'm a contractor for Straw Hat, which most people probably don't realize.) So... I still had some work I needed to get done before I disconnected from civilization again.

So I went to the front desk to extend our stay at the hotel for an extra night and now I would have real zero day! I would not do any official trail hiking at all! Well, kinda....

I still needed to get out and stretch my legs. I go crazy if I can't walk at least a little each day, and I had the idea that I'd just keep walking down the Cascade Trail. It was fast, flat and easy. And, at this point, is was pretty close to Burlington. It wasn't a long drive to get back to the trail, and it would be an even shorter drive to get back to the hotel at the end.

Amanda dropped me off back in Lyman to continue walking the Cascade Trail.

But the route is also an alternate for the PNT where some people follow it all the way into Sedro-Woolley, then walk up Highway 9 back to the primary PNT. I didn't plan to to do that, however, wanting to return to the primary PNT as quickly as possible.

So I followed the PNT alternate... but not as part of my route to the end of the trail. So it turned out to be a zero day that had me walking on the trail! As confusing as that sounds.... That's the PNT for you! =)

I didn't take any photos for the day because I didn't need anything for Walking 4 Fun and there was nothing particularly exciting to take photos of. I just enjoyed the walk. (The two photos in this blog post I actually took yesterday when I first walked into Lyman and got off the trail.)

Amanda and I had planned to meet at a parking area just off of Highway 20 a couple of hours later, and I walked right past it without stopping. I didn't see Amanda in the parking lot so I thought maybe it was a different parking lot we had agreed to stop at and I just didn't recognize it from the direction I came. So I kept walking, further and further into Sedro-Woolley, at which point I eventually realized that I must have passed the parking lot. I had just beat Amanda to the meeting point--which almost never happens!

After realizing that I definitely passed the meeting point, I gave her a call and she said she was waiting for me at the parking lot and a bunch of cops were parked there as well. I hadn't seen any cops when I went by either! Exciting things were happening, and I was missing all of it! =)

Anyhow, I told Amanda where I was located, and she drove out several minutes later to pick me up about 1/4-mile from the end of the trail in Sedro-Woolley. We stopped at Carls Jr. for lunch, then I returned to the hotel to get some online work done. Amanda spent the afternoon exploring the area some more.

Lyman, apparently, had a problem with people riding their horses through town on public streets, so prohibiting that was their number one concern. It's gotta be a pretty nice town when the biggest problem you have is people riding horses through it. =)