Noelle here:

I either hike out with Steve in the mornings if it’s a “travel” day for me or I hike out to meet him in the afternoons to come back to the van together. In this particular stretch, if he did 20 miles a day, I got to see him for four days in a row. How fun! He’d leave the van between 5:30-6am, I’d go back to sleep 😴, then drive ahead, stopping in a town if there was one for any resupply, get to the new spot, then hike out to greet him. So fun!

Sometimes I get caught in roadwork

Or cleanup, where they’re dragging mattresses out of the woods. Really? Who leaves a mattress down a ravine?

But mostly it seems like I get to see amazing views and meet great people and I’m only hiking between 4-16 miles a day! It’s a pretty decent gig!

That was my “backyard” one night. Below was my view out the “front yard”.

Yes, that’s a little teddy bear. It was a memorial of some type.

I keep trying to capture great sunsets.

And once in a while I get up early and see the sunrise too.

I can’t imagine a summer like this. I’ve never been outside (or away from home) this long. It’s been neat spending so much time not knowing what day of the week it is and barely knowing when it switches to a new month. I keep pinching myself that we’re actually still out here.

If Steve decided to stop hiking tomorrow, this will still have been the most amazing adventure and I’m so thankful for it! Yes it’s hard and it’s not the adventure I thought it’d be, but it’s still amazing.

These guys were my neighbors, a couple nights ago.

I sat under this bridge for an hour, soaking my feet before going a bit farther to meet Steve.

As of July 18th, I’ve hiked 485 trail miles and 569 total miles (counting both ways of my out and backs). It’s a good summer.