Day 4 (Waterbury - St Johnsbury, 105km or 65mi)
I got up early and started packing. It was a cool night indeed but I was warm, maybe because I decided to wear most of my clothes to bed (which was not much - I didn't take a single long sleeve shirt and had no socks). At 6:50am when I left air temperature was only 11C/52F. A bit too cold for sandals. Pretty soon my toes felt a bit numb, especially on fast downhill.
I put the rain jacket on, which help blocking all the wind chill, but had nothing to protect toes and fingers with. It would've been nice to buy socks, but there were no appropriate stores open anywhere at 7am. I kept going, sticking to Cross Vermont Trail.
Weather forecast for that day said partly cloudy with sun and no rain. Unfortunately, in the early morning hours all I could see was nearly nothing. Everything was covered by a thick fog.
Before 9am I was already in Montpelier. Foggy weather continued and it was actually quite pretty, especially when sun started peeking through. The worst part about it was that on downhill my glasses got very quickly covered with millions of tiny water droplets and I couldn't see anything. I had to stop frequently to wipe it off.
By 11am fog was pretty much gone. It was getting hotter and more sunny. I stopped at Cabot briefly, got some water in a local store and kept going towards the last section of Lamoille Valley Rail Trail. Now I feel that the hill I climbed right outside of Cabot was sort of pointless - it didn't add anything meaningful to the trip and it was probably better to just take the main road (Rt215), which wasn't that busy.
The first part of the remaining trail was rough with chunky gravel yet again, but once I reached Channel Dr the graded trail begun and from there it was basically all smooth sailing all the way to St Johnsbury. Even better - the whole trail is this direction is on down slope making it very fast to ride.
I got back to my car at 2pm after 4 days of cycling, 436km (270mi), 2 burgers and 6 beers.
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