No, that’s not trail magic! 🙂 We saw this poor cow later in the day. We smelled it a quarter mile away.

We started early and said goodbye to Heather and never saw her again for the rest of the day.  The guy she originally camped with went by a few minutes earlier.  We didn’t see any more hikers for the rest of day.

After 10 miles or so we encountered a bucket with writing that said sodas and food in 1.5 miles.  I guess I did my restaurant-parking-lot-thing (where I haul ass from the car to the food) and Pat said I was going very fast after that. On the way to the sodas we crossed a highway and a sheriff’s SUV rolled up.  I’m sure he had been watching us and timed it on purpose to check us out. I’m finding that there are a lot of authorities out here watching everyone very closely.  He was really nice though and wanted to make sure we had water, etc.  We said goodbye to him and I was back on the trail magic scent.

It was a geodesic dome thing for shade with several coolers filled with sodas, beer, and ICE so it was very cold!  I had two of the new orange vanilla sodas.  Not sure about this flavor, but they were cold and wet and really hit the spot.  I also had a banana and we talked with Apple for about an hour.  Apple is a super nice former IBM electronics engineer.  We talked about the good old IBM PC days, DOS, Plotcall, etc.  

Apple is also a drone guy so we talked about that for quite a bit.  He had a new Mavic and a bigger drone that he said could lift 5 lbs.  He said he could fly 4 sodas 1.5 miles to where his sign was and deliver them to hikers.  That’s really cool but I suspect some hikers might get annoyed or scared.
Apple said Heather came through earlier and wasn’t feeling good.  Apparently she has been throwing up for the last two days. 

We are camped in a wash under a tree and near a water tank with great water.  We did 19 miles today and I’m beat.  Good night.  Sheesh the moon is bright!  It’s like a headlight.