OXFORD – The trail has ended 374 miles short for Sally and Rick May who decided to suspend their 2,175-mile hike along the Appalachian Trail on Monday.

“It was time to come home,” Sally said.

She and her husband boarded a bus in downtown Lewiston on March 5 with only a pack on their backs to set off for a six-month journey along the trail from Georgia back to Maine. They made it two weeks short of six months on the trail, choosing to stop in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Last weekend, they climbed up and down 4,802-foot Mount Moosilauke in Benton, which is about 60 trail miles southwest of Mount Washington. Afterward, they decided they were done rather than continue on to the Presidential Range and then to mile-high Mount Katahdin, the end of the trail near Millinocket. That will wait for another year, maybe even two.

May said she and her husband had made a promise that if they were not in Maine by the second week of September at the latest, they would not go through to the end because Katahdin in October would be no picnic.

“To sum it up, it was everything we thought it would be and more,” said May, who lost 40 pounds on the trip while her husband lost 30. Everyone from the hikers to the “trail angels,” those people who assist the hikers, were wonderful, she said.

For the next few months, the couple said they will decompress. “We need to regroup, get some things done and get back into the real world,” said May, whose husband will reopen his auto repair business beside their home on Allen Hill Road on Jan. 2 as originally planned. One of the first things they faced on getting home was to repair electrical damage from a lightning strike in June,

May had always said it was the journey and not the destination that was important. The remainder of the trail is just one more adventure the Mays have to look forward to in the future.

“We want it to be as fun as the first 1,801 miles,” she said of the end of the trail.