Bobby Brady finds the bad luck idol

 Tuesday, July 6th. No sense of time, but sometime mid afternoon

Still on the Eastern Trail, now past the Scarborough Marsh. We had left John (our driver) at our last stop with the very general direction of "We'll meet you in the parking lot of the Saco Hannaford". We were still in the happy phase of our walk, this was about a five mile leg, and it was hot out, but at this point we were still being driven by optimism and good vibes from the start of our walk. This wasn't going to last.

This is us entering Old Orchard and then Saco. Note the slight degradation of us at the Saco sign.

Also note the water soaked shirts on Pete and Joe. Check that. Water soaked implies the wet was caused by water. Make no mistake, that was sweat my friends. It was hot and we were feeling it. Heat has a way of (in your mind) adding miles and (in actuality) wearing you out. But buoyed by our pleasant experience thus far on the ET there was actually some discussions of us sticking to it all the way to Kennebunk. That, we would eventually find out , was being overly optimistic. And unrealistic.

So after a few more miles of walking through the calm of the trail, we were thrust back into the traffic of Route 1 now in Saco. The five of us huddled after taking the overpass over Route 1 to be sure that our handy dandy ET trail map would take us to our meet up destination or if we had to start walking on Route 1 again, map showed a bit more of trail walking and (up to this point) the map don't lie.

      Maybe 15 minutes after crossing over this overpass we made it to our next scheduled rest stop. Meet John, water and snack up. Oh, and Joe finds his wallet! After an hours long manhunt by Joe's family, turns out it was in his bag snuggly tucked in with all of our "stuff" in the back of John's truck. Don't know why Joe didn't maybe think of suggesting this to John , oh, say, about three hours ago. John actually said he considered rummaging through Joe's bag, but his sense of protecting Joe's privacy, along with the fear of what he might actually find packed away in that bag, kept him from doing so. Next time (if there would be a next time) John pledged not to be so chivalrous. Don't blame him.

While we all rested, I took advantage of my Hannaford connection (Hannaford is my employer) and went inside the store, not only  to go relieve myself, but also to stand in the Produce backroom cooler to try and take about ten degrees off of me. Not sure why I didn't have any other takers.

    Per usual our routine on these stops was to both rehash what we just went through and also plan our next leg. Based on our nothing but good experience on the ET, and referencing the map that don't lie, it looked liked a quick walk through part of Biddeford to connect to the trail. We'd already covered about ten miles, and based on our preplanning, given that we didn't leave until noon (actually AOP was noon...we left about 45 minutes after that), our day 1 goal was already met. We decided to press on.

    This is when the ET map started to lie to us. This is the part of the story I've been dreading to relive. Despite having some of these things to occur over the next few days... 

    - another 95 degree day

    - blisters on our feet

    - pain in our joints

    - Tropical Storm Elsa

this was the worst leg of our entire walk.

    Let's see if I can convey the misery the next few hours gifted us.

    Remember, were were hot and tired, but still feeling optimistic...and also a bit delusional, thinking somehow we were going to make it to Kennebunk when we connected with the ET again. If the second leg of the trail was anything like the first, we just might make it.

    Right.

    Let's start with this. Here is the map we were using as a guide to reconnect with the trail after our stop in Saco.

    Yellow lines are on the road - green line is all trail. So our plan was to walk down Route 1 in Saco wind though the lovely town of Biddeford, Elm Street to Main Street - turn left on Cathedral Oaks - walk part of the trail - on to Barra, then BAM, we're back on the trail. Easy, right? Wrong.

    This part of the walk was EXCRUTIATINGLY long. We were good walking from Saco into Biddeford. Getting off Route 1 in Biddeford was our mistake. Here's the problem, It doesn't matter how you walk from where the trail ended in Saco and starts again in Biddeford. Can't be done. Strike that. SHOULDN'T be done. There is about a five mile gap between the two points. Looking back on it, if we had known this and were adamant about sticking to the trail we should have piled in John's truck at that break and driven to the restart of the trail. Oh, and also clearly not called out on the map - or should I say not clearly called out on the map - is this. The trail starts again in the back corner of a parking lot of a Hospital...a hospital five miles away!

    We eventually made it to the start of the trail, which ended up being the end of our walk for the day.    Enough bitching....here are some details of us walking, slowly melting, and generally deteriorating between these two points.

• Walked past and posed for some photos at Thornton Academy. Not sure why. None of us have any connections for this school. Actually , maybe a little distaste even.
• Entered Biddeford and then started following the map path to reconnect to the trail
• Somewhere on a side street in Biddeford Joe finds a necklace with a cross on it, picks it up and pockets it.
• This is where the title of this post comes into play
• If you're at all familiar with the Brady Bunch, there was the episode where Mike takes the family to Hawaii. Early on Bobby find a Tiki idol, and thinking it is good luck, keeps it.
• Well, the joke was on the Brady's. That idol was not good luck, it was actually bad luck!
• How else can you explain...
• Bobby sitting on Don Ho's ukelele
• Alice throwing out her back while doing a hula dance
• A tarantula crawling across Peter's bed while he is asleep
• ..and worst of all, Greg wiping out while surfing.
• Throw it back Joe, before it's too late!

    So , you get the picture. we're hot, we're not finding the trail, and we're walking aimlessly through Biddeford. Spirits are declining, Link is getting lame, and we're all silently plodding along. As we walk along Main street, the only goal is to find Cathedral Oaks Drive...that's the street on our (un) trusty ET map that brings to the reconnection to the trail. It's like the Holy Grail. Somehow finding the street with make everything better.

Except it won't.

Main Street in Biddeford makes Main Street in South Portland look like the Champs des Elysees in Paris.

(This is Paris, by the way, not South Portland)

    I'm using my old trick of walking through lawn sprinklers that I see in people's front yards. I look behind me and see Joe following suit. We're starting to have some noticeable distance gaps between the walkers now. The lead group has lost sight of the back group.  Denise and I come across a biker and I say to him, "Is this the way to the Eastern Trail?"...but it sounded more like "isyay isthay ethay ightray ayway otay ethay easternyay ailtray"? Gibberish. Thinking he understood me, he said something like, "Yeah it's just around that corner"...despite not even being able to see the corner anywhere ahead of us that he was speaking of, we pressed on.

* Is this post wearing you out yet? That's the point. I want you to have at least an inkling as to what we are feeling at this point. Although writing this is tedious enough (as, I'm sure reading this is as well), it's not 1/100th as tiring as this day was. I promise, the following days won't be as tedious.

    We take a break at a picnic table in the yard of an apartment building, huddling up with John to plan our next move. Pinning all of our hopes on the bicyclist indicating the trail was near we decided to keep going. Oh, and we thought we found a boyfriend for Denise. As we were recuperating on the picnic table, a shirtless inhabitant of the apartment house comes out with his dog to get a smoke and he tells us that he heard us (me) on the radio that morning. I picture him loving Foghat. Personally, I think she could have at least given him her number.

    I think John had actually done some reconnaissance and found that the mythical Cathedral Oaks was indeed, just around the corner. This stop was probably the hardest of the trip to get the legs in motion again...heat...exhaustion...but we were walking that trail to Kennebunk, even if it killed us (which was now feeling like a distinct possibility). We pressed on.

    Hey! up on the left it's the street we've had on our radar for the last hour and a half (that's a guess, because just like you reading this post, at this point we had lost all concept of time). Left on to Cathedral Oaks, walk through a nice neighborhood, then guess what? Could it be? A path through the woods! Come to find out, these was a bit of a tease....after traversing a bridge over a stream, we had maybe a 300 yard reprieve in the shade of the woods until we found ourselves back on a main road. Now, I've been in Biddeford dozens, if not hundreds of times, but I had NO CLUE where we were. Left or right decision once we hit the road (this time for real) and we felt right would continue us South , so we took the right

    

    Yeah, that's the turnpike to our left. So now we're on Barra Street or road or boulevard. Kind of a main road, sidewalks, office buildings, a hotel. No clue.

Then we come to a VERY main road. I'm talking street lights. four lanes of traffic, there's a Dunkin' Donuts...and a Taco Bell, and an Amato's, and where the hell are we? This must be one of those routes in some unfamiliar part of Biddeford that for some reason I've never driven down...I'm not the best with numbered routes...maybe is route 112, or 202, or 309-11...who knows? (And another side note - it wasn't until post walk that I would figure out where were were, which was just off the Biddeford exit and then on Alfred street toward the five points intersection. It's amazing what a different perspective, and twenty miles of walking in 95 degree heat can do to your sense of direction).BUT, across the street, what's that we see? A sign for the Eastern Trail. Hallelujah ! We have made it...but wait, this sign is pointing us into the parking lot of a hospital. Now we're pretty beat up and as close to dead on our feet as we'd be for this whole walk, but not hospital beat up. So, we kind of aimlessly walk through the parking lot, in the general direction of the back corner. Finally, there it was, the entrance to the Eastern Trail. If we had found this , maybe, two hours earlier, we would have kept going, but at this point we were ready to wave the white flag. Actually we were ready somewhere along Main Street, but like the early explorers centuries before us (think a much less prepared Lewis and Clark) we were driven to make it to our destination. This is a picture of how we looked at this point.

    I have this pictured saved as "burnt toast". That's what we were. This was the point when we decided we were done. Not just done, but done done. Initially feeling discouraged, it wasn't until we had a chance to collect our thoughts that realized that this was actually four miles beyond the planned end of the day one walk. This is something we did (and ultimately worked in our favor) for each leg of our trip. Call to John, vaguely try to explain where we were, and wait for our ride.

    Good place to stop. Next post will be a quick overview of our first night's accommodations, then the entirety of day two of our walk. I promise you (and myself) that I'll cover each subsequent day in an individual post. I needed this one to be as painful to read as it was to walk. It's more rainbows and unicorns (although not entirely) after day one.

Geez, this was a long one.

The Eastern Trail Giveth and the Eastern Trail Taketh away.

Tuesday July 6th - 12:30 PM or so

After much fanfare, we're off. We were already about a hundred yards to the good by not starting at the very end of NY Ave, but what's a hundred yards over a 110 mile walk? Actually, just did the math...1,760 yards in a mile...193,600 yards in 110 miles, divided 110 miles by 193,600 yards and the number was so small I couldn't understand it

Can someone explain that to me? Anyone? Didn't think so.

The fab five. This was the best we looked until our first showers post walk sometime Sunday afternoon or evening. Actually I'll take that back. This is the best we looked for probably ten days or so. Blisters have a way of aging you a bit. I saved this picture as "the walk virgins". By the time we finished we had been around the block a few hundred times...both literally and figuratively.

The police escort we were hoping for didn't materialize, but we did get some public works vehicles (unless the timing of the start of our walk just happened to coincide with the street sweeping schedule in Sunset Park that day). There were a few antique cars, which was appropriate because you also had five antique walkers making their way down NY Ave.

* Side note*

    This was the street I grew up on, so the memories are flooding in. The home run I hit in Little League tryouts when I was nine years old on that very baseball field (side note to the side note - when your athletic career peaks at nine, can you really call yourself an athlete?...and how sad is it that you still find a way to mention this story any chance you get? Yeah, pretty pathetic.). Thinking of all of the times I'd crisscrossed this same street, and all of the surrounding streets, while trick or treating as a kid. How many thousands of times I'd walked, or rode a bike, or a skateboard, or a car up and down this street. Which of these houses I'd been in over the years (most of them), I slept over in (many of them), or delivered newspapers to (a lot of them), or mowed the lawns of (some of them). The multitude of touch football games and wiffleball games on this road, shots taken on hoops in these driveways, the games of hide and seek, capture the flag, and God knows what else in the front and backyards. That was the Richard's house, and the Jipsons, and the Cooks, and the Millers, and the Wildes - yes, those Wildes.

    There were well wishers all along the road, both sides. I guess the word got out after all. Walked past the house I grew up in, where one of my big brothers and my sister were waiting for us at the end of the driveway. My brother handed me a badge that was my Mom's when she was a crossing guide when I was a kid. That might come in handy, knowing we had my Mom watching over and keeping us safe on the hundreds of roads we had yet to cross ahead of us.

    First turn of the day took us in front of Link's house for our last photo op before things got serious.

Some history -

     After the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 , Link got the idea to paint a giant logo of the Sox on the landscape of the giant sloping hill of his front yard. Here's a photo of a clipping from the newspaper with the original paint job. Sorry for the scribble on the pic. Some guy named Johnny Pesky thought he'd write a personal message and sign his autograph on the photo - In case you can't make it out, it says "To Link. Great job, Johnny Pesky". The nerve of some people.

    Fast forward 17 years, Link had the idea to recreate that logo to call attention to our walk. With some added touches. This is the best he could come up with....

    This became a bit of a local attraction. Link and his wonderful wife, Michelle, said people would drive by day and night to take pictures of this and ask questions regarding what this was all about. Even though Link's house is on a side street in Sunset Park, this logo was visible from Main Street - also known as Route 1- So I can't imagine how many people drove by this on their daily commute, or the number of tourists on their way to Pine Point, or Old Orchard, or the Holy Donut (trust me, tourists love the Holy Donut), or wherever else a drive on Route 1 in South Portland might take you. I know I went out of my way more than a few times to see this in all its glory.

    Here's the photo op...might be the last picture of us on the walk when we weren't drenched either in sweat or rain.

    If I knew that's the way we looked when we started, I would have doubted we were going to make it. I have this pictured saved as "If they only knew". What a crew. Jesus, this was me after losing a significant amount of weight with all of the walking I'd done over the last year. Still a big boy, The only one that still looked this fresh by the end was Denise. The rest of us would resemble the Walking Dead.

    

    Finally we were leaving the safety of Sunset Park. Right on to Route 1 (right was South, right?) and 109 miles later , we'd be there. This was where our first missed opportunity from our plan took place. For months Link wanted to take a picture of one of us heading one way and another heading the other way...to show just how a bunch of amateurs would start a 100+ mile walk. We mentioned getting this pic halfway down NY Ave., ten minutes later we had forgotten all about it. So it goes.

                  

    This was our new reality...walking in the breakdown lane with traffic zooming past us. Oh, and had anyone noticed how hot it is yet? Just past where the old Humpty Dumpty potato chip plant used to be was our first big hill and the first coordination of getting five walkers semi synchronized in crossing the road in tandem, sort of. At the top of the hill we still had one of the local tv stations taking some video of us...still looking fairly fresh...seeing we were only about two miles in. First rest stop/water break was at Lois' Natural Foods store on Route 1 in Scarborough. Did I mention it was getting hot yet? My youngest daughter works here and she wanted us to stop by. So we did. Went in and bought the only water the walkers purchased on this entire trip (John, our savior) would handle this for the next six days, which he did exceedingly well. One last visit with various Erskine's and McHugh's and we were back on our way. Why the bag Pete, why the bag ?

    This is where we made a route decision we had discussed more than a few times in our pre-walk conversations - stay on Route 1 or take the Eastern trail and reconnect with Route 1 somewhere in Saco? Almost the same mileage - about 11 miles to our next proposed stop - the Hannaford in Saco. Route 1 would give us more exposure, the Eastern Trail would take us through the Scarborough Marsh and some wooded back trails. Who needed the exposure when it's over 90 degrees. At this point we were shade seeking missiles and we chose the trail. One of the best decisions of the entire walk.

    It was at this point - between our stop at Lois' and the decision to take the Eastern Trail, that Joe realized he no longer had his wallet. Joe's our financial guy, so he, of all people, needs to know where his wallet is. Oh, and he, as had a few of us, had left his phone in John's truck. Using someone's phone, Joe got ahold of some family members and commenced to dispatch instructions like "Check Dad's house" or " look in my truck" or "check my dirty clothes pile" or some other similar wild goose chase type directions. One of us, can't recall who, had eventually gotten ahold of John to let him know that Joe's wallet was MIA. Handsome Joe was trying to recall when he last remembered having his wallet on his person, and the best he could come up with was "sometime this morning". Huge help Joe. As we're walking South, John is now walking North, retracing the three miles we've already covered back to the start, scanning the ground in search of Joe's wallet. The thing about this, in our pre meetings, John often called out how he was the smart one because he was the only one of us riding to Boston and not doing any walking. I'll be damned if he didn't walk the same first three miles as us...just in the other direction. John was now matching us step for step in the opposite direction looking for that god damned wallet (at least I imagine that's what John was calling it at this point). John was doing this unbeknownst to us. Did I mention it was hot?

    Meanwhile the walkers are settling into a groove. Hot but finding some shade on Eastern Road, across Black Point Road, and then finally on to the Eastern Trail. If you've never walked the Eastern Trail, I recommend it. At least this beginning portion of it. Here's a snip from a brochure of the Eastern Trail. Gives you a flavor of this portion of our walk. Just like the brochure says, we were relaxed and we were enjoying. Still.

    And here's a couple of photos of us, somewhere early on the trail...See? Still relaxed.

- despite the missing wallet.

    After we crossed the Marsh we met up with John. This was the first of dozens of John's telepathically timed meet ups with us. Always when we needed a quick break. So just over the marsh we did what would become our quick stop routine...get some fluids in us, grab something to eat (usually a banana, or a tangerine, or a melted protein bar - did I mention it was hot?) and assess what we just did and what we had ahead of us. The focus of this conversation was Bob's (see what I did there) still missing wallet. Laugh, complain, recap, plan, and then head out. At this stop I had grabbed an ET (Eastern Trail for future reference) map. This guide served us well, for awhile, and would then fail us miserably, by the end of the day.

    This is when the the trail (and map) was still our friend. We were currently at the parking area at the intersection of the trail and Pine Point Road. You can find it on this map. Based on this we had about an eight mile leg ahead of us before we'd intersect with Route 1 again. So, with food in our tanks and freshly and fully watered, we had our plan for the next few hours until we'd meet John again. And we were on our way.

    This continued to be one of the nicer parts of our entire walk, despite the heat. Wooded and shady, we continued on our way, locking into the rhythm and cadence that we would find ourselves settling into over the next six days. At times we'd walk as a entity of five, or pair off into groups, sometimes having  conversations, frequently falling into spells of quiet, one would walk a bit ahead (ahem, not naming names) , one or two or three would fall behind..it was all very fluid and worked for us on the entire walk. Despite the heat (have I mentioned the heat already?) we had put about ten miles behind us and were feeling pretty good. Could the entire one hundred and ten miles (see how I spelled that out instead of using numbers? - makes it seem even longer that way) go like this? A guy can dream.

                              

I didn't expect day one to take three posts, but it looks like that's exactly what's going to happen. The rainbows and unicorns from the start of the walk will turn into - well, whatever is the opposite of rainbows and unicorns.

Stayed tuned.