Update from Vermont

Quarantining in style

Hello!

I MADE IT! Woohoo! For all my anxiety about crossing borders, those ‘murricans sure are chill about letting people through so long as they’ve got the cash for a plane ticket. Yay capitalism, I guess. Seriously, they didn’t even bother taking my contact info! I could be traipsing up and down the country, kissing strangers and breathing on other people’s food, and they wouldn’t have any way to stop me. I care about public health though, so I’m observing the quarantine period like a good lil Canadian.

What a fucking plane ride, guys. Holy shit, what a plane ride. My flight from Vancouver to San Francisco (yes, I had to fly to SFO - it’s literally the only international flight leaving from the Vancouver airport, but I digress), was uneventful and reasonably well-spaced, but my long haul red-eye from SFO to Newark was another story entirely. After a six hour layover in an airport full of people without masks, I boarded a 777 that was jam-packed with old men wearing their masks below their noses and broken air conditioning. After getting a minor technical issue fixed in the plane and waiting another half-hour on the tarmac, we finally began to taxi down the runway, only for the pilot to announce that because several passengers were “having trouble complying with our very simple mask requirements”, we were required to taxi ten minutes back to the gate to kick those assholes off. In true New Jersey style, the entire airplane booed. It was wonderful. Less wonderful was my man-spreading, nose-baring, sleep-apnea-snoring seatmate who wanted to tell me all the reasons public health advice was wrong and Covid was “no worse than the flu”. This being a long-haul flight leaving at midnight, I was able to feign sleep until he left me alone, but holy hell. 777 economy seats are crammed to begin with, and that’s before an ignorant old man takes up half your seat with his oblivious thigh spread and obnoxious virus breath. I got off the plane hobbling on one side from attempting to fit myself inside the windowsill.

After a quick 45 minute hop from New Jersey to Burlington, Constantine met me at the airport and we were dropped off by a fan of ours at an AirBnB. I haven’t left the building since, and let me tell you, I am so ready to get hiking. It’s a nice enough little place with lots of natural light, but it’s also a very strange apartment, and I’ve been amusing myself by trying to figure out exactly which ill-advised renovations created this weird floorplan. So far, we’ve figured out that the bizzarely narrow bathroom used to be the HVAC closet. We’ve been amusing ourselves in other ways too, but my parents read this newsletter, so I’ll spare you the details.

What else have we been up to? Well, we’ve been working on a series of NCT prep videos! There are three published so far, with more to come. Check ‘em out!

Apparently it’s the rules of Youtube that you have to zoom out farther and farther with every new video - at this rate we’ll be filming from space by the end of the week.

In that last gear video, I promised our subscribers a full breakdown of the contents of our packs on my blog, so look out for that in your inbox in the next few hours. Feel free to just click on past it if you’re not after that specific list - you won’t miss anything. We’re also thinking about doing some Magpie-centric videos where I just explain things in deeply specific detail, so if that’s something you’d be into, leave a comment here or on our YouTube channel.

What’s next for us? Well, our delivery food should get here in the next fifteen minutes so I’m looking forward to that. I’m done with my quarantine on April 28th and we’ll spend the next day running around to REI and the grocery store so I can make some final tweaks. April 30th, we’re hitting the trail! Since the NCT is so rarely travelled, we realized that if we tracked our progress and stuck to the official route, we’d be the Only Known Time on this trail and therefore the Fastest. So you can follow along with our GPS track on FastestKnownTime.com and know exactly where we’re at!

Okay, that’s all from me for now!

Take care, and talk soon,
Magpie