Day 7: Roundtop Shelter to Johnson State College

I'm excited about getting to town, and I'm up and out of camp quite early. Around 8am I come across a lovely bouldery vista over valley fog. 

The trail goes down down down a few miles to the road, and I get to the crossing early. Almost out of juice, I text Dennis who plans to pick me up and drop me to the motel JSC are providing, before he goes to teach at the college.

There's a suspension bridge over the Lamoille River, and I sit in the sun with nothing else to do. Finally, my brain shuts up and I'm in a sort of contented trance for quite a while. This literally never happens to me. Worth a week of struggling through the woods and sleeping in the dirt. 

It turns out I messed up, and was waiting at the wrong road. By the time we've figured this out, it's close enough to class time that I have to go straight to the college and wait a couple of hours before going to the motel. I feel fetid, and uncomfortably alien in the clean, institutional setting where normal people are wearing normal clothes and not smelling of campfire. It's noted my pack might set off the elevator smoke alarms. I go to the women's room and am shocked at my mud-streaked, lower-leg-bruised, incredibly-spotty appearance. I've eaten more chocolate in the last week than in probably the previous couple of years, and my skin is surprised. I sit in the music office -- where a glamorous, shiny poster of ME in concert gear adorns the door -- and I sift through emails on a plodding desktop. 

And then... to the motel. And the longest bath, in which I eat generic poptarts and marvel at the layers of skin peeling off me. I phone some dear ones, text some dear ones, and have an exhausted, discombobulated quiet "practice" of my rep for tomorrow. I hope the old saying about crap rehearsal=good performance holds true. I sleep with cable news on low, and I don't wake up cold at 3am.