I received my medal for completing the PCT on Wednesday! I had been looking forward to that since before I started!! (Somewhere along my journey, Fun Size crushed my dreams by telling me it was a fake medal made out of chocolate! No! No… Don’t do this to me! …He left me thinking that it really was chocolate. Fortunately, I can confirm that it is a real, hefty medal! I feel proud. And I love the PCTA for giving these out!).

My computer is presently in the hospital for a two night stay, as it had been in near death condition when I returned. Hopefully, it will soon be revived and then I can get to work on my many projects.

I recently dipped into depression land as the result of too much loneliness. No one has time to break from their busy schedules and hang out with a girl who has so many stories to tell about traveling from Mexico to Canada. It makes me very sad. And it got to the point where I was feeling very angry in the grocery store. Why don’t I know anyone here? Why don’t I have friends here? It was so great to always run into fellow hikers at nearly every store and restaurant I went into along the trail. Automatic friends. Such a close- knit, connected community.

I had an even tougher time when I made my first foray into Boston the other night and was immediately besieged by more people than I had seen in the last five months at the train station- many of them angry and rushing to get on a train. It was overwhelming and the energy was crushing me. I cried most of the way from North Station to Davis Square and wished I was back in the Sierras. The Sierras! The toughest part of the trail and the part I was most sick in. And the part of the trail that I did not want to return to again. But now…

I wondered why hiking nearly 3,000 miles in all kinds of conditions with a heavy backpack weighing on my shoulders, sleeping on patches of dirt, and all while being sick was relatively easy for me and why walking through the city is so extremely hard and soul- crushing to me? It’s going to be a hard road…