Hockessin, DE to Chadds Ford, PA
section miles: 10 total miles: 196
This blog post is brought to you by the Miracle of Christmas. Meaning Rene has threatened to take away my Christmas present if I don't get the blog written before Thanksgiving. Never one to procrastinate, I still have 6.2 hours to make the deadline. Which, by the way, is about twice as long as it took us to walk this final section of the Mason-Dixon Trail.
The easternmost leg of the trail is one of those head-scratching, let's walk down roads through random neighborhoods sections that make you wonder about the point of it all, but the weather was lovely and the fall colors were fabulous and we had Hank's Diner waiting at the end. A young mother jogged by with a baby stroller on a shady road through a woody, wealthy subdivision. "Are you... HIKING?" she called out, incredulous. Why yes, we are... sort of. It's like jogging, only slower. Much slower, in our case.
There are a few touches of bona fide trail along the way; maybe two miles or so in total. The trail guides had noted that we had to "cross a creek", so we hiked all day well prepared with wading shoes and extra socks and hiking poles, only to discover a trickle of water spanned by a tidy little bridge, like something you'd see in a garden. Further on we stumbled upon an archer sitting in a tree stand with a dead buck sprawled out on the ground about thirty yards away - a situation that seemed oddly disconnected, like somebody else's deer just happened to expire a short distance from where this guy was perched, perfectly motionless. I'm not sure who was more surprised: him, us, or the deer.
The end of the trail brings you along the floodplain of the Brandywine River, which is scenic but festooned with stinging nettle (memo to self: wear long pants next time). I had visions of a long hike along the river as it winds out of Chadds Ford, but unfortunately the path was all to short, and before you know it, you are dumped out onto an industrial lane, where one-hundred yards later you reach the eastern terminus of the trail, marked unceremoniously and randomly next to a telephone pole across from some dilapidated building. Dear Trail Guys, we love you, and heartfelt thanks for all the trail effort, but c'mon, man, put the end of the trail at the edge of the woods, not halfway down some alley. From there it was a life-threatening dash along Route 1 to get across the river to our car parked at the Brandywine Museum.
This is the part where, having just completed an entire footpath end-to-end, one is supposed to reflect back on the journey as a singular life experience and wax poetic. But let's just say this: 200 miles is a durn long way to walk in a directional sense (as opposed to say, 800 laps around your high-school track), and we are both proud and astonished that we actually did it. The walking is easy - one foot in front of the other, repeat for several hours - but it's the planning, the finding time, the getting organized, the putting off of other things, the avoiding all excuses why you can't do it... that's the hard part, and the part Rene tackled with aplomb. I never could have done it without her.
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