12.4%!

Let me start off by saying that I’ve attempted to make this post three times already, but since “hiker midnight” is around 9pm, I get awfully sleepy after a full day of hiking, and haven’t been able to make it much past a paragraph or two. We haven’t had much phone service since we’ve been back on the trail though, so you wouldn’t have been able to read about our adventures anyway…

Today, (Wednesday?), my dad and I are spending the day in Hot Springs, North Carolina. We are now a full 271.4 miles (or 12.4%) into our journey. We passed through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 6 days and then it was just another 2 to get here. (If you look on a map of the AT, you can actually see that we’ve moved north now!) Hot Springs is the first town we’ve come to where the AT literally runs down the sidewalk on the main drag. There are metal AT plaques set right into the concrete! Last night we stayed at Elmer’s Sunnybank Inn, an old historic boarding house originally built in the 1840’s that now primarily caters to long-distance hikers. My room was in the study on the 2nd floor. It was full of books that I would love to have read if I wasn’t so darn tired. My dad was off the main hall downstairs near the music room, where recordings were made by the Library of Congress in the 1940’s. It was a welcome change to sleeping 6-12 inches from your closest snoring fellow hiker (and there have been some loud ones!) on a wooden platform in a shelter. Despite the freezing cold shower, (the temp was pre-set), I was very grateful to have my own bed to sleep on and my own space to spread out in. And they had a wonderful $6 breakfast this morning with real fresh-brewed coffee! That instant stuff we’ve been drinking has only been just palatable.

We hiked our longest (at 17.6 miles) and wettest (full-on rain and wind for a good 9 1/2 hours) day to date yesterday. We even managed to make it into town an hour and a half before sundown! (Not that the sun even came out from behind the rain clouds to go down!) We’ve hiked for that many hours before on the trip, but not that kind of distance. Other hikers have said that it takes 3-6 weeks to get your trail legs — I’m hoping that means we’re starting to get ours. Yesterday’s elevation profile was primarily downhill though, with a couple of big ups in the beginning of the day, so that may have had something to do with our ability to get to Hot Springs in such a seemingly short time. We think that on average, we tend to hike a mile and a half per hour. (That includes stopping for food and for photo-ops). We’re hoping to speed that up a little so we can continue to get more miles in per day on average — and so I can be home in time for that wedding! (Love you, Doni!)

When we first came back to the trail 8 days ago, I was unsure where we’d fit in. Since all of our hiking buddies to date were so far ahead of us, I was afraid we’d have no friends. Silly me, everyone out here is nice! And now, we know more people and can look back in the shelter registers to see who has come before us and when. Even though we come from all walks of life, are all sorts of ages and from all sorts of places, we all have hiking the Appalachian Trail in common. It’s a unique bond that you really don’t see much in real life. Everyone looks out for each other. If you’ve been hiking around the same pace as others for a few days and you don’t run into someone on a break or at a shelter, you ask other hikers if they’ve seen them. You hear who’s been injured, who’s taking a zero day, who’s got family coming to visit…it’s a true community. And it’s very easy to tell who is a hiker when you get into a town. Just look for the folks in rainsuits and crocs, wandering around with a ziplock for a wallet, eating everything in sight and waiting for their laundry to get finished. Or, like today, just come to the local library, where everyone is furiously typing up emails to home or posting to their blogs.

That’s all for now — I wish I could share some more of my photos but technology along the trail has not happened at the speed of New York City.
~Melissa