We continued on into the night. Sam took a wrong turn at one point and ended up a few minutes behind. He was delayed another few minutes by a man who offered to sell him drugs. I (James) found a spot to wait up for him, as I wanted to take a rest myself anyways. We ended up sitting on the sidewalk for about 40 minutes. We were 75 miles away from the beach and Sam proposed the idea of just walking 5 more miles tonight and doing 70 miles the next day. While it was tempting, I suggested that we should stick to the original plan of getting 40 miles out of the way before pitching the tent. We each took a shot of 5-hour energy before finally getting up and walking. After the energy supplement kicked in, I thought about the possibility of walking the full 100 miles without sleeping. This idea was short lived. About 8 miles later, we stopped again to sit at some tables outside a restaurant that was closed. We fell asleep for about an hour. We were pretty exhausted at this time (more sleepy and not as much physically tired surprisingly). But we forced ourselves to get up and keep walking. It soon started to rain, which made the walk even more unpleasant than it already was. About an hour later, we both had to use the bathroom. We went to about 4 gas stations who all said their bathrooms were “out of order.” Yeah right. Finally, we found a truck stop where we could use the bathroom. Afterwards, we had about 3 miles left of walking before we could sleep. Around 6:30am, we found an abandoned field that we could pitch the tent in. To save time setting up my tent with its broken poles, Sam just set up his tent and we both slept in there.
We waited until around 1:30pm before Tomer met us at our camping spot. I hadn’t slept much, but I still felt more rested after being able to lie there for 7 hours with my eyes closed. Slowly, we got going and packed up the tent for the very last time. After about 10 minutes of walking, the route took us through a shopping mall. This was the first time on the entire walk that we had progressed across the country by walking indoors. It was pleasant pushing the strollers along the smooth marble floors of the mall. I also threw out my sleeping pad, which had become worn out and hardly inflated anymore. After 10 minutes or so, we were back outside. Tomer walked with us for a bit more before heading back to his car. With about 50 miles left (meaning we had walked 10), I really began to feel the struggle physically. We had said that we would not sit down for the last 60 miles, but this did not seem realistic. Tomer met up with us again and brought us some McChickens. He walked with us for a while, and it was nice to have some company. With about 40 miles left, Sam’s mother, Lili, met up with us. I needed to use the bathroom desperately so I marched into a restaurant and headed straight for the bathroom without ordering anything. We then kept on walking. With 37 miles left, we gave up on the no-sitting challenge and sat down on some chairs by the sidewalk. Lili also brought us some burritos to eat during our rest. We were started to get very fatigued, both physically and sleep-wise. Eventually we continued on, although the beach being only 30-something miles away was not quite as motivating as I anticipated. Lili drove slowly next to us to keep us company at night, which honestly was very comforting. It was tempting at times to want to call it a night, but we had planned to finish our walk the next day and didn’t want to fall short.
12/2/22