TRAIL JOURNAL
/ May 23, 2022
We ended up staying longer than planned in Big Bear Lake because our resupply box didn’t show up. A resupply box contains all the food and any other supplies needed. Support Team A sends us resupplies very week or less. It’s great because we can tell them what we need and have it less than a week later. If we’re sick of eating oats for breakfast, I can tell Mum and she will try to give me something different. She usually sends the box to a post office along the trail and they hold it for us until we pick it up. It all works really well unless there is no post office or the post office is closed when we go by.
We were scheduled to come into Big Bear on a weekend, so Mum had called the Motel 6 in Big Bear City to see if they held resupply boxes for hikers. When she heard that they did and they do it all the time, she thought she had solved the problem. When we got there though, the front desk staff had no idea about our resupply box. They told us that packages aren’t even delivered there! 🙁
So what happened to our box? We had to hang around all day Sunday waiting for the post office to open on Monday to find out. The lady at the post office was super helpful. She found the box for us and let us know that they had notified Motel 6 twice to come and pick it up the week before, but they hadn’t. For hikers and their support teams: the post office does not deliver packages in Big Bear City. They only notify recipients to come to the post office to pick them up. So you might as well just send to the post office general delivery, unless you have a real promise from someone there to go get it and hold it for you.
Well we got our resupply, which had a special drawing in it from Lachlan, and we were able to get back on the trail with just a day’s delay. In the meantime, we got to see a bit more of Big Bear Lake, even got a trolley ride!
All’s well that ends well, and we were able to get back on the trail a day later with everything we needed.
- Magnus!