Layover day at Schoolhouse Bay

Another layover day? you may be thinking.

Yes.

The on-trail layover day. It’s a rarely-implemented practice, unfortunately. In the right place, it is pure magic. School House Bay is a right place.

We don’t see anyone all day. I catch up on every single one of my journal entries. We make a big pot of tea and sip it while the chilly breeze pushes around the low lying clouds. I play crosswords with Prana. We discover that if you solve one with the sound turned on, it plays a jazzy little jingle of success. We also discover that the leap in difficulty between Monday puzzles and Tuesday puzzles is ego-bruising. We go back to Mondays. I take a bona fide afternoon nap. I finish reading a book of short hiking stories by an English author.

The Wekas return to the tent frequently throughout the day, garbling and cooing and being nosy. At one point one of them snatches the bread bag that contains our trash from where it is tucked between Prana’s pack and the tent and dashes triumphantly into the woods with it. Luckily he doesn’t make it far before giving up and dropping it. At another point one of them tries to grab the stove, but it makes such an unexpected clang that he leaps in alarm, drops it, and flees.

We cook a dinner of pesto blue cheese gnocchi, and three other hikers, presumably thru-hikers, arrive and set up their tents. We hide in ours. Even with sleeping in, and a nap, I still am able to easily fall asleep early.