Day 4 – 07/05/22 – Over the Hill…Literally!

This morning, I left the Silver Strike Casino in Silver Springs, NV at around 7:15am PT. My team and I scoped out a couple of different stop locations for tonight. Because of the painful blister on the bottom of my right foot and the fact that I’m still conditioning my body to a “new normal” of walking for most of the day, I wanted to have options.

There is no “true” shoulder on this 2-lane stretch of “America’s Loneliest Highway”, so I knew walking conditions would be rough. That being the case, I asked someone from my team to contact the Lyon County Sheriff’s Department and give them a heads up that a slow-moving vehicle, supporting a walker, would be travelling between Silver Springs and Fallon. A very nice officer stopped by a bit later to check in on us. He wished us luck on our journey and said to contact them if we needed additional support.

Now, let’s talk about the headline of this blog, ”Over the Hill”. Today’s walk was full of hills. The first climb was 4 miles long! I walked forward for a while, then even tried walking backwards for a bit. It was a tough journey, but I did it! I really had to concentrate on my breathing a lot today because of the energy it took to climb all of those darned hills!

Since I can’t read the chat from my stream while I’m walking, my mods were reading them to me. There were some points where I was only able to give one- or two-word answers because it took so much focus to properly breathe and watch my posture so I don’t cause any injury to my body. I had to stop several times so I could rest and appropriately treat the blister on my foot. Even with these stops, I still averaged 2.11 miles per hour of walking time.

After walking hill, after hill, (after HILL!), and adding a few extra miles to my walk, I landed at the 50 Horse Ranch in Lahontan Valley, NV. I cooked a good meal for dinner and shared some fun time with several people in Discord. It’s been a great day and I’m dogged tired. Here’s to a good night’s sleep!

Some of today’s highlights:

• Meeting and talking with a hiker
• My daughter’s friend, Jerome, dropping off supplies and goodies from home…and my sunglasses!
• A man in a truck who saw us and stopped to show support. He offered us some water and watermelon
• Truck driver who about blew my eardrums out with the FREEDOM horn blowing. (Painful, but still much appreciated)
• Passing the first location my team researched as a potential stopping point and walking to a location further away
• Horses greeting me when I got close to the stopping point. They actually started following me as I walked along