
Trail Tales: Jennifer Miller
Last July, the day after I got a new bike, I rode from Middlebury to Goshen with my husband. Since everything was new and different, I did not realize until we stopped for ice cream at the Chief that my phone mount had broken off and my phone was gone. We retraced the entire route searching frantically for my phone, asking random strangers if they had seen it. My son pinged the phone’s location on C.R. 20 up the road from where Mooey’s is now (NOT where I rode!), but when I got there it was nowhere to be found. Then, a cyclist I had talked to about my missing phone closer to Goshen, passed me as I was still riding up and down the road searching and told me a shirtless jogger had found my phone and supposedly put it on a log. I raced back in the direction he told me the jogger had been, and before I even found him, sure enough, there was my phone, balanced on a large log on the side of the trail near C.R. 33 (across the bridge). It was completely intact and working!
To this day, I still don’t know where my phone fell off, what happened to it between there and the log where I found it (did someone in fact take it a half a mile up the County Road first?), or who the benevolent shirtless jogger is, but I am very grateful for his kindness, as well as that of the gentleman on the bike! This is just one of many wonderful memories on the friendly people I see every day on the Pumpkinvine trail.