Day 118 Winturri Shelter to Happy Hill Shelter

Today's miles 20.4.  AT miles 1737.3

Another long, hard, tiring day - lots of up and down rollercoaster hills again, smaller but steeper ones today.  We left camp at 7:30, it was a warm sunny day again.  It was mainly downhill initially just over 3 miles to a road, passing through a field of very inquisitive Jersey cows and crossing a very nice wooden bridge just before the road itself.  It was confusing at this point where the trail continued, there were some rogue white blazes leading us the wrong way down the road.   Someone driving past pointed us in the right direction. 

It was from here the steep uphills started.  Over the next six miles we had five steep hills to go up, over and down again.  We stopped at the end of this section for a lovely ice cream and soda break at Cloudland Farm shop sat on their porch.  It was just 0.2 miles off the trail.  The remaining eleven miles in the afternoon weren't as bad as the morning but still very tiring.  It was more or less an uphill again from the farm shop then a long down and a long up.  The trail was pretty good today underfoot and we kept flitting between forest and open areas.  There were lots of lovely wild flower grass meadows, the grass nearly as tall as me in places and also a few wild fruit shrub areas with white flowered fruit bushes, we're not sure if they were blackberries or blueberries.  There were also some tiny wild strawberries.  We didn't pick any, we left them for the animals.   It was very hot in these open sections in the sun.  We were pleased when we kept entering back into the cooler forest.   We also passed a couple of maple farms in the forest.  Lots of plastic piping woven amongst the Maple trees collecting the maple sap to make maple syrup.  Vermont state is the biggest producer of maple syrup apparently.

We finally arrived at Happy Hill shelter at 6:45.  No one else was at the shelter.  We don't know what happened to No Big Deal as he was ahead of us and was planning on staying at the shelter.  Gizmo was behind us, he never turned up either, so it wasn't just us who found the day tough.