At the Mason – Dixon Line, a brief rain storm blowing over South Mountain brings tears from heaven over the Troverts’ leaving the Sunny South. However, the short lived shower is more than enough to provide a wet coating to our first look at any of Pennsylvania’s notorious rocks on the trail, and within 15 minutes send a stumbling, fumbling N down for his third fall of the trip, a one point landing on his left knee which amazingly draws little blood. For those keeping a scorecard at home, that keeps X’s lead in AT falls to the barest two-digit margin.

Pen Mar County Park times two: Just before we enter state #7, we made a brief stop at the local park. We’re so early the restrooms aren’t even open yet, but the soda machines are working and well positioned near the picnic tables for our first break of the day. We enjoy the view to the west. Eager to see her first relatives since we’ve been on the trail, X goes into her “horse back to the barn” mode, and we are moving along with dispatch. The plan is to have Wayne, X’s brother-in-law, pick us up where the AT crosses a former C.C.C. campsite, Old Forge Park, and take us to their home in Shippensburg, PA.

That plan changes quickly when we check for cell reception and X gets a text message update. Back in the early days of this journal (like last February or March), Bill RoseSniffer (don’t you just love it when a whole family takes on a group trail name when they go hiking?!) happened upon the Troverts and convinced his wife Amy to make the AT, and us!, part of the home school curriculum for their kids: Aidan, Gracelyn, Jackson, and Samson. Since then the RoseSniffers have been in occasional contact with us, saying they were excited about meeting us when we passed through Pen Mar. When we left Harpers Ferry, we left things up in the air, agreeing to set a time to get together as we got closer.

In spite of the wonders of modern communication, that didn’t happen and four miles down the road further north, here comes this text saying “RoseSniffer Cokes @ Pen Mar 2day!” A flurry of texts and phone calls followed, after which we set a personal record for the last two and a half miles, and met up with Wayne who rushed us back south to Pen Mar. It was a treat to meet not only Amy and the kids, but Bill’s mother as well. She told us about how she had helped support her son on his own thru hike well before the turn of the century, and how she has loved the trail ever since. The RoseSniffers had come prepared with way more than just the Cokes (fresh fruit, sandwich fixins’, chips, donut holes, cookies, etc.) and did well by us and all the other thru hikers passing through on the trail today.

At Edie and Wayne’s, we have our first access to an accurate scale in a while, and learn our combined weight loss is now at phenomenal 55.5 pounds! That’s about what we have hoped to achieve for the whole trip, and we hope it doesn’t dip any lower. For tomorrow, our number one priority will be some new clothes for N to wear to next month’s family wedding in the Catskills, as the clothes we mailed ahead are now way too large!