A tale of two adventures – The hike at Delaware Water Gap – The mishap at the hotel – Dealing with the travel agency – Recovery – Unexpected communication from the IRS – Energy bill – Strategy for future hikes in northern Pennsylvania – Shopping at the new food market – Farmer’s Market on Sunday – The virus makes inroads, here and abroad – Tropical Storm Isaias – Wildfire in California – Evening statistics
Today’s entry will be quite a long one, on account of two adventures yesterday, one quite pleasurable and one, alas, very much the reverse.
The first adventure perhaps doesn’t quite deserve the name, for it was planned in advance. I spent the better part of the day on the Appalachian Trail starting from Delaware Water Gap and going south. I can thoroughly recommend this area. Delaware Water Gap is not, to be frank, worth a special trip in itself, though it is pleasant enough. I had visited the town during the winter (en route to a trip to New York) to hike on the AT in the northern direction, which goes along a ridgeline that features a woodland pond (which I saw when it was frozen over, the ice-covered surface glittering in the bright sun and forming a strange contrast to the brilliant blue sky above) and lovely views of the Delaware River meandering through the valley below. The southern route is equally scenic. It begins by circling past a small lake that at this season is covered with water lilies in full bloom, so densely that from a distance it looked more like a garden bed than a lake. The trail then goes up Mt. Minsi with views of the same river valley I had seen on my previous hike in the area, but looking at it from the south rather than from the north. The trail passes several other areas with similar views, as well as one clearing that is used to launch gliders, with a view of the town of Stroudsburg below. I went as far as Wolf Rocks, whose view at the top is not as breath-taking as the guidebooks say – the trees obscure a great deal and the views along the way are much more extensive – but it is an enjoyable rock scramble. Butterflies were flitting about everywhere along the ridgeline, chiefly tiger swallowtails and black swallowtails.
There are certain caveats to hiking here. The blazes are a bit sparse in places. It probably is best to go on a weekday, since the ascent to Mt. Minsi is quite popular and it was fairly crowded on a Saturday. Also, one should try for a day with somewhat more moderate temperatures. Unlike previous hikes on other parts of the Pennsylvanian AT, the temperature was not much cooler on the ridgeline than it was at Delaware Water Gap below and there were not many breezes. I felt quite drained when I reached the summit of Mt. Minsi and I took a rest at the most appropriately named Lunch Rocks (a perfect place to stop and eat, as the name indicates, with a beautiful view to the north and with reasonably flat and smooth rocks to sit on). After that I felt re-energized and I continued further than originally planned, going about 9¼ miles before turning back. I was not worried, however, for I had plenty of time, the hotel being only about 25 minutes away from where I had parked, and any difficulty I might encounter would be filling in time for the evening after dinner – or so I thought.
And here is where my second adventure began. I went up to the Travel Inn, and it was not at all prepossessing: a single-level motel with exterior entrances for all of its rooms, very shabby and unkempt, with several beaten-up chairs reposing beside some of the rooms’ doors. And the glimpses of the people I saw going in and out of the rooms were no more reassuring: one young woman who emerged, for instance, had bare arms that were tattooed to the shoulder. Well, I thought, I’m not going to have a particularly comfortable night here; but it’s only for one night and I’ll be out early in the morning, so it will be no great matter.
But when I went up to the check-in counter I was told that the inn was sold out. I protested that I had made a reservation in advance, but that made no difference: there was nothing in their records and all of their rooms were booked. Later on the hotel manager returned from various errands; she was more sympathetic than the reception clerk (whose reaction was simply to shrug the matter off) but she said that nothing could be done.
So there I was, after a hike of over 18 miles in the summer heat, eagerly looking forward for an opportunity to wash my hands and face, take a shower, and get a chance to lie down a bit before eating dinner, only to be told that I had no option of doing any of these.
In desperation I called Orbitz, through whose agency the reservation was made; and this proved to be a great mistake, though not as great as that of using Orbitz in the first place.
After going through their menu options and then waiting 15 minutes, I managed to break through and make contact with someone, only to be disconnected a couple of minutes later.
The second telephone call started out a bit more productively. The woman I spoke with expressed sympathy, took the precaution of getting my number in case of disconnections, spoke with the hotel personnel, confirmed that getting a room there was impossible, contacted the reservations department to explain the situation, and then transferred me to speak with them directly.
All of these procedures took some time, of course. I was beginning to feel that the situation was becoming more and more surreal: sitting on a battered chair beside a run-down motel with the cell phone continually glued to my ear, getting occasional curious stares from people emerging in and out of the various rooms, intent on hearing the disembodied voice emanating from the other end, which one could easily imagine to be a communication from some sort of ghost from the spirit world. To make the analogy complete, the name of the reservation agent to whom I was transferred was Caspar. (NOTE: this is an allusion that most people under 60 will not understand. There was an animated cartoon to be seen on television when I was growing up called “Caspar the Friendly Ghost.” It was not at all a good show, but it attained a certain degree of popularity.)
Alas, my Caspar may have been ghost-like but he was not friendly or at any rate not helpful. First he insisted on contacting the Travel Inn people again, even though the agent I had spoken with previously had already done so. After he re-confirmed that there was no possibility of my staying there (a fairly time-consuming process), he went to the business of trying to find a hotel in the area. To do this he naturally had to put me on hold. From time to time we got disconnected. I must do him the justice to admit that he called back whenever that happened. Occasionally I received what might be called progress reports – that he had contacted such-and-such a hotel, but had been placed on voicemail. Finally he came back to me saying that the closest place he could find was a certain hotel in Easton.
Now a hotel in Easton, as I discovered afterwards, would have been not at all a bad compromise. It was between 15 and 20 miles away from my current location, and the drive to the point I planned to park for the hike on the following day would have been no more than an hour. If I had been prepared for such an eventuality I would have accepted the arrangement without question. I was not so prepared. I had never experienced anything like what I was undergoing now. I had been on the phone for over an hour (that sounds like an exaggeration, but the phone records bear me out on this point), I had been disconnected three times running, and for all I knew, Easton could have been on the other side of the state. I could not at this point place the slightest reliance on Caspar’s competence. I was dusty, thirsty, tired, disheveled, and thoroughly out of humor in consequence. So I told him, “Do you know what? Forget the whole thing. I’m going back home.”
And that is what I did. I regretted the hour I had wasted on the phone, which would otherwise have given me more daylight to drive in, but it may have worked out better for me in the long run; it was already past 6:30 when I departed and traffic was quite light by the time I got on the road. For that matter, the appearance of the Travel Inn in Wind Gap inspired no very great desire to remain there for the night and it is even possible that I had a lucky escape. This shift in attitude did not occur at the time, of course. I was bitterly calling down maledictions on Orbitz through much of the drive home. At one point I stopped at a gas station for re-fueling and while I was there I picked up a bottle of lemonade at its convenience store, so that thirst at any rate could be alleviated. It was only after I reached my house just before 10:30 – I made better time than I expected – that I was able to regain a degree of genuine composure.
There I was able to eat a little of the food I had previously prepared for the trip – I was too tired to eat much – and also to get a brief glance at the mail that had arrived in the afternoon. One of these was a tax refund, quite an unexpected one. I had made out my taxes in March, calculated that I owed taxes to the IRS, and went to a tax professional to ensure that I had calculated correctly. (She actually was able to lower the amount due to some extent.) I have no idea what caused the IRS to give me this bonus, but of course I’m not complaining about it. I was sufficiently curious to examine the signature – but no, Donald Trump was not claiming the credit for this one, as he had done for the stimulus check; it was signed by the Department of Treasury official.
The other important piece of mail was my monthly electric bill, which was lower than expected. I have, after all, been running the air conditioner continuously over the past month in the face of the unrelenting heat of July. But then again I keep the thermostat at 77 degrees – anything below that is too cold for me – and that means that it usually isn’t running much during the night.
In the morning today I weighed myself and discovered that, not surprisingly, I lost a couple of pounds after the experience of yesterday, with so much hiking and driving for hours on end after the hike and so little food after the drive. But undoubtedly much of the weight loss was water. It will probably be restored by Tuesday, the day scheduled for my annual physical. Well, I mustn’t allow my physician to believe that my body mass index is lower than usual, I suppose.
This episode shows, incidentally, that it is theoretically possible for me to go any point available for parking for the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania, complete a planned hike, and then return home all in one day. The parking area at Delaware Water Gap is at the longest distance from my house of any of the parking areas for the AT in the state. But it simply is too wearing to do such a three- or four-hour drive after a hike of several miles and two or three thousand feet of elevation gain. One of the reasons that I spent a long time on the trail yesterday (over six hours) is that I believed that I would be staying overnight at a place nearby and that there was therefore no particular reason to hurry. I could take rest breaks as I needed, linger at overlooks, stop to pluck berries from the bushes, and so on. That belief turned out to be an illusion, of course, but the hike itself was a very relaxed affair as a result. During the more recent explorations of the Pennsylvanian AT, I would have one eye on the clock on account of being anxious to end the hike at a time that allow me to drive back afterwards without encountering too much traffic. Even Harrisburg, which I have to drive around for any of the parking areas east of the one on Rte. 850, can get quite congested during rush hour. If I am to complete the remainder of the AT in Pennsylvania, as I wish to do, I will have to arrange for some sort of accommodation east of Harrisburg when hiking there. I will, however, be careful to take a printed copy of my reservation with me whenever I travel and I will contact the hotel in advance to confirm any reservation I may have made online. I also definitely will not be using Orbitz again.
Since I was not able to hike today in the AT as planned, I turned my attention to other matters. I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to visit the new food store that opened last week. It had been advertised as a “new food store experience.” It was a bit of a disappointment. Its selection is fairly good, but most of its produce is packaged in bulk, with too much in the packages for a household of one person to be able to use up before spoilage. Most of the fish they offered was frozen. The store was full of customers, however, and it certainly was gratifying to see a new store opening up in an area that has plenty of food markets already and doing such a thriving business.
Also, when I went to the post office to mail my check to the electric company and to the bank to deposit my IRS check, I noticed that the Farmer’s Market is now open on Sundays as well as Saturdays, which is a recent development. I had wanted to pick up some cherries at the new store but I decided against it when I saw that the minimum I could buy was two pounds; but I was able to obtain a more manageable amount of the Farmer’s Market. Now I have some for the next few days without having to worry about eating all of them in time before they spoil.
Hotels that have no vacancies and are obliged to turn would-be guests away, new stores filled with customers, Farmer’s Markets running twice as frequently as before – all of these indicate that our economy is doing rather better than the official reports suggest. If so, the administration can claim some justification for the course it has pursued in our reaction to the virus. But quite a heavy price has been paid.
A glance at the statistics shows just how heavy it has been. I was too tired to log in and obtain the statistics for yesterday, but I find that in the course of a day and a half that our case count has increased by over 90,000 and the death toll by over 1,500. The death toll per day for the country has been over 1,000 for six consecutive days. California has more than 500,000 cases. Florida’s daily case increase is continually 10,000 or more. New York, of all places, is offering some bright spots. The state’s test-positive rate is 0.9% and even for New York City the test-positive rate is 1%. The state’s number of hospitalizations is the lowest it has been since mid-March and it has sustained only three deaths as of yesterday.
Of course, we are not the only nation having difficulties. Even Vietnam has recently endured an increase in cases of 50% and has lost six people to the virus – quite a low amount for a nation with over 97 million people; but a severe disappointment to one which until recently has had a triumphant record of no deaths from the virus at all. Australia has declared a state of disaster in Victoria, which contains Melbourne and is the second-most populous state in in the country. Melbourne now has a daily curfew from 8:00 PM to 5:00 AM. Residents may shop only for essential items and they are not allowed to go more than three miles from their homes. South Africa’s case count exceeds 500,000. Colombia’s case count has overtaken that of the U.K. India’s daily case increase exceeds 50,000. Mexico has had a case increase of nearly 10,000 in a day. It has the third-highest mortality rate of world nations,
There is also a most bizarre report of 40-odd passengers and crew members being infected after two Arctic cruises on Norwegian ships completed earlier in July. Why anyone would be taking a cruise under the current conditions is something of a mystery. The crew members have all been quarantined but the passengers were discharged before the coronavirus cases were diagnosed, and now Norwegian officials are scrambling frantically to trace them and direct them to quarantine before they infect others. I rather think that they will discover that there’s no method of putting back that mushroom cloud into the nice, shiny uranium sphere.
But of course one can’t be focused on the coronavirus all of the same time, and Mother Nature, among others, is apparently seeking diversions of her own. Hurricane Isaias threatens to affect the entire East Coast. It has already hit the Bahamas and caused great amounts of flooding there. It is currently off of the Florida coast and slowly heading towards the Carolinas. Governor Northam is anticipating massive flood damage in the coastal areas of Virginia and has declared a state of emergency in advance.
Then there is the Apple fire in the Cherry Valley of California, a wild fire that has already covered over 20,000 acres and has forced over 7,800 people in Riverside County to evacuate. It has no containment at this point. Much of its northern and eastern edges are in rugged hillsides inaccessible to fire-fighting equipment. The hot temperatures and low humidity make it likely that the fire plumes will increase, despite the efforts to combat it.
All in all, being denied a room in a hotel on account of a reservation mishap seems rather a trivial matter in comparison with what’s been going on in other parts of the world.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 18,220,978; # of deaths worldwide: 692,365; # of cases U.S.: 4,813,640; # of deaths U.S.: 158,347. This is going to sound paradoxical but there is actually a hint of good news in these figures, at least from the national point of view. We actually had a case count increase of less than 50,000 today. And the nation’s deaths now account for less than 23% of the world’s total, whereas before they were well above 25%. It is something of a commentary on the state of affairs that figures such as these can be classified as an improvement on what has been going on earlier. Modified rapture, as W. S. Gilbert would say.
