So, me and a new friend start hiking together for the last couple days of Pennsylvania. Our 20 mile day to Wind Gap starts at 5:30 AM and ends up taking 12 hours. It was that rocky; a hike that normally takes between 7 and 9 hours took us until 5:15 to complete. Both of us are deleriously tired, plus cold and wet from an afternoon of rain. We head towards the Gateway Motel that our guidebooks say is .3 miles to the left of the trailhead. The sign is spotted fairly quickly, we take another left just in front of the sign and head up about a 90 meter driveway. Two people are already standing there; a couple we both know from Hawaii who started from the same shelter we did around the same time; we'd been leap-frogging them all day. There are two doors that are wide open and the couple don't appear to be going towards any other room. As we approached the building we discover that the whole place has been gutted. You can see the floor joists and there's not a scrap of dry wall left on the walls. The couple had just called a cab about 5 minutes before we arrived and had been told that he would be there in about an hour/hour 1/2. By this point we're also starving but the logic we have on the trail is: once in town, you don't pull out your trail food. None of us grabbed anything out of our food bag, not that being this stubborn is helpful, it's just the way we saw things.
When the cab driver finally arrives, true to his word about an hour and 15 minutes later, we all climb in and tell him we want to go to the Red Carpet Inn. Another grand surprise! He doesn't know where this place is and asks us how to get there. Of course, all we have is a guidebook map that doesn't have a whole lot of detail or information but we figure it out. Once checked in, we shower and order 2 large pizzas, garlic knots and a bottle of Sprite. When it arrives at our door we learn that their large pizzas are 18' or 20' across so we pack out pizza for the next day.
Our 15 mile day goes smoother but we did get rather tired of pizza; we had 3 stops for food and each time we had another slice. We did get rained on again in the last 4.5 miles...deja vu. Due to the rain and how cool the town is, we decided to zero in Delaware Water Gap.
New Jersey was the next state and even now, is actually my favorite one to have hiked through. The trail was easy, the scenery beautiful. There were "bog logs" or "cat walks" or whatever you want to call them zig-zagging through the woods and there was an actual boardwalk at one point. It was part of the Wallkill Wildlife Refuge.
After beautiful New Jersey, I head into New York with a different hiking partner going by One Feather and the 1st town I remember hitting is Greenwood Lake. Five miles outside of Greenwood Lake we meet Windwalker who decides to break for camp with us. We hike for the next few days together, the three of us. We walk through a NY zoo and get to go swimming in a pool just outside the zoo, we order pizza and subs at a deli and we spent a fair amount of time sharing some comedy. Although NY was rather dry, there were numerous water jugs at just about every road. The state seemed to go by rather quickly.
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