Mel and Mike Hike

Here we are again. Back at the Fontana Hilton, the “hotel” of the Appalachian trail shelters. There are flush toilets, showers and room to sleep 24. And let me tell you, it looks like there will be that many here tonight! 8 days behind our original visit to this place and wow, we’ve hit the prime time for northbound thru-hikers. We were a little ahead of the
curve before. Now that the weather tends to be a bit more consistently warm, it’s the time when lots of folks start their hikes.

So we’re behind all of our former buddies and we may or may not catch up. From all we’ve been told, thru-hiking is like a giant game of leap frog. We had to take off for 8 days early on, but others may have to do that in the future. We may run into hikers in Maine that we haven’t seen since Georgia. Since we got out of the trail regimen, we’re going to be a bit off our game for a few days. Everyone around us is new to us. It’ll likely be another few days until we feel like we have real trail buddies again. But everyone here is nice and we have food to work off from being home and eating lots and lots of comfort foods. We might be slow for a couple days, but it’s nice to be back.
~Mel

A couple of nights ago, at the Sassafras Gap Shelter, a bear got into the shelter and ripped open a hiker’s sleeping bag.  No, just http://mightyjungle.com.au/cialis-tadalafil-online/ kidding.  It got into the shelter, and ripped open someone’s food bag that they forgot to hang.  No, just kidding.  It was really a skunk that was rummaging in the food bag, and it sprayed 3 or 4 people’s sleeping bags.  Poor them!   No, just kidding.  It didn’t spray, it just ate someone’s oatmeal.   No, just kidding.  There really wasn’t an animal problem at all.

The real problem was that I slipped over a rocky ledge, and fractured my left tibia.   No, just kidding. It was really Melissa, and she only sprained her ankle.  Good thing we have an Ace bandage and a lot of duct tape.  She’ll be OK in a few days.  No, just kidding. It was really me, and what happened is that I slipped while filtering water from the stream, and hit my head on a rock.  It bled a little while, but we fixed it with Super Glue and duct tape.  No, just kidding. I did hit my head on a rock, but the only thing that happened was that it knocked my new filling out (yep, the one Dr. P. just put in over my root canal a couple of days before I left home).  No, just kidding. The filling is fine.  We really don’t have any bodily injuries at all, and my feet are MUCH better now.  I have no real blisters anymore; my feet have toughened up nicely.  We’re powdering our feet morning and night with Gold Bond Powder.  We love the menthol.  For a minute or two, we can’t smell our own body odor!

The only disaster that really happened is that this computer at the Fontana Lodge in the Fontana Village doesn’t allow us to load any pictures!  It has a USB port, but I can’t get it to work with my card reader.

Alas!  Oh, well.  At least there are no bears in this place!  No, just kidding.  Actually, there’s one coming at me from across the lobby!  It’s near the fireplace now!  It’s about to …

(This is by Mike, using Mel’s phone.)
It’s Saturday the 26th of March. We reached N.C. Rte. 28 yesterday, after 5.5 miles of hiking; a total of 162.6 so far. There is a little town of Fontana Dam here, and we had packages to pick up at the P.O., but instead of getting them ourselves, we checked into the Hike Inn (a small, hiker-friendly) hotel, and had the boxes delivered here. Six days of supplies, our bounce box with occasional resupply needs, Mel’s hard drive and a box of special goodies from my sister Deb.
We had a great dinner at a Mexican restaurant in nearby Robbinsville, sharing a table with three other hikers. Then we made a quick grocery stop before https://sdarcwellness.com/ambien-zolpidem-online-10-mg/ Nancy (the Hike Inn owner) shuttled us back to our cozy room.
Then we sorted, packed, planned and tried to relax. We need to rest a bit more, so today we’ll see Fontana Village, lunch at a restaurant and hike a mere 1.1 miles to the Fontana Shelter, also known as the Fontana Hilton. This shelter sleeps 24, and has a hot shower! Won’t be as nice as the Hike Inn, but luxurious as far as free shelters go! We hope to reconnect with some hiking chums there.
We’re hoping to get on a real computer at Fontana Village and post some photos today. For now, that’s all. Nancy will shuttle us back to the trail in just half an hour.

This afternoon we crossed the border from Georgia into North Carolina. 1 state down, 13 to go. 79.3 miles of walking in just 7 days with 35-40 pound packs on our backs. Wow! I’m kind of amazed with ourselves, if I do say so myself.

(editor’s note – no cell service now, so not sure when this will post, but it’s Friday the 18th)

A big thing that’s struck me and my dad is the kindness that follows along the trail. It’s hard to describe the kind of absolute friendliness that we’ve encountered on our journey so far. The fellow hikers, hiker families and locals have all been incredibly supportive. All of the Georgians we met, from the Hiker Hostel folks that picked me up at the MARTA station, to the post office clerks in Hiawassee who think that “oh, it’s so nice for you and your dad to be hiking the trail together before your wedding” to the families out for day hikes and picnics have been just so, I don’t know, nice! They wish us good luck and health and they have smiles on their faces. And boy are we stinky, too! I’m not sure if these folks are always this nice or that it just seems extra nice to me because I’m just used to people in NYC trying not to look at each other on the street or the subway. But maybe, just maybe, there is something actually magical about the Appalachian Trail.

There is, actually, a thing called “trail magic” and we’ve encountered at least 4 episodes so far. Our second day out, coming into a gap where there was a road and a parking lot, there was a “trail angel” giving out cupcakes and sodas to all the thru-hikers. He had thru-hiked a few years ago and was giving back to the new class. (Apparently there had just been pizza too, but we missed it.) On our 4th day, there was a church group at another road crossing with a plethora of goodies for hikers – fresh fruit, raisins, sodas, milk and medical supplies too! And yesterday morning another trail angel left a bag of homemade cookies and brownies all ziplocked on a rock!

But it’s not just food, it’s an overall helpful vibe. If you read Mike’s latest post, you know that sadly Tim had to end his trail-time with us this morning. To get back to where the car is parked in Tennessee, a fellow hiker’s wife who was headed north, offered to take him part way!

Anyway, it has been something special so far and that’s what’s making all of the leg-burning, foot pain, freezing when you crawl outta the tent to pee at night, sweaty when the sun’s beating down on ya and the overall massive stinkiness factor worth it. We are very sad that Tim had to go today, and we heard (but it’s not confirmed), that our new buddies from Raleigh, Black Thunder and Wild Card got off the trail today too. And this is going to be the bittersweet part of it, I think. We’ll be hiking a similar schedule with some folks, get to know em a bit, and then it’ll be our time or theirs to move on, sometimes without even knowing it. And we’ll be glad to have met them, but sad to have parted ways. They say everyone has to “hike their own hike” though and
I guess that’s just what we’ll have to do.

Thanks as always to all of our followers new and old! And a big thanks to our families! We love and miss you very much.

It’s 8:03 – shuttle leaves in a few minutes to head back to the trail after our first town day/night.  Hope my toes have recovered a bit.  Here’s the latest from the BTL (blistered toes league);  Mike 4, Mel zero (it’s a shutout!).  Hope that didn’t jinx Mel’s toes!

Mike, Melissa and Tim on the porch at Hiker Hostel

Mike atop something!

This post seems to have been a long time comin’!  We’ve finished six days, and it’s impossible to describe it all in a post.  I’d have to be typing for six days.  I’m going to try to attach several captioned photos at the end; I hope they’ll give some sense of what I don’t have enough time to put into words.

First of all, everyone we’ve met along the way so far has been very friendly, the guys who drove Tim and I down to Hiker Hostel, the hikers we met there, Josh at the hostel who gave us tips at the start and drove us to the trailhead parking lot, and all the hikers we’ve been meeting along the way.  AT hikers typically adopt trail names; sometimes a name given to them by other hikers, sometimes they think up their own, but almost always related to their hiking style, gear they carry, their food preferences, a funny occurernce, or anything else that seems to just “fit”.  Some that we’ve met repeatedly (either because we hike about the same pace, or have camped at the same sites) are “En Zed” – a woman from New Zealand, “High Five” – a young lady who did the first few days with her dad (I think Melissa and I identified with them a bit for that relationship), “Rainbow”, “Wild Card”, “Black Thunder”, “Prophet” – who’s soon going to be a minister of some sort, “Nosebleed,” and  “That One Guy” – so named because everyone seems to have an amusing story about him, along the lines of “Did you see what that one guy did?”, or “Do you know that one guy is carrying 13 pounds of books?”  Almost everyone has commented on the 3 1/2 pound camera Melissa brought, so sooner or later she had to get a name related to her camera.  Someone named her “Click” and it stuck.  We just met “Art Gypsy”, another professional photographer; Click and Art Gypsy were talking f-stops or memory cards or something when I left the group to type up this post.  I’ve taken on the name “Long Time” (in part short for “Long Time Comin’ “, since I’ve wanted to hike the AT for so long, and it seems in part because it takes me a long time to get over the mountains and finally end up at the campsite each night).

Until today, we were averaging a bit over twelve miles per day, but today we quit early, hiking just 6.2 miles to catch a shuttle at 11:00 AM into Hiawassee, GA.  This town is 11 miles off the trail, but here at the Hiawassee Inn, everyone’s a hiker.  We needed to shower, do laundry (yes, every bit – we wore just our rain jackets and rain pants and nothing else while we washed it all), then we picked up drop boxes at the P.O., and caught an all-you-can-eat buffet at Daniel’s Steakhouse.  It didn’t include steak, but for just $5.98 each we had fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, corned beef and cabbage (Happy St. Pat’s Day!), collard greens, tossed salads, every other imaginable kind of salad, rolls globbed with butter, desserts and bottomless iced tea.  Incidentally, I’ve lost five pounds already (well, that was before lunch – now I’m not so sure).

Until tonight, we have tent-camped every night.  The shelters have either been full or we’ve reached them too early in the day to quit.  Lot’s of folks seem to quit around 2 PM, and they get the “prime” shelter space.  I think we’re better off in our tent next to the shelter – we can get the cameraderie, campfires, pick up bits of useful info from other hikers, and not have to put up with the mouse infestations!  We’ve only had one rainy night in the tent (and it was miserable most of the next day).  Tonight it’ll be heavenly to sleep in a bed, but the shuttle leaves at 8 AM, so the luxury will be short-lived.

Tim (now a.k.a. “Tenderfoot”) has to part ways with us; his blisters are too bad to go on – by the time he healed, he’d just have a few days left anyway, so he’s reluctantly quitting now.  He promises to meet up with us for some more of the AT when we reach New Jersey.

Our next town stay might not be for another week or so, so we’ll try to do some small posts in the meantime from Melissa’s iPhone.  Thanks to all for your comments, encouraging and humorous.  It really helps to know you’re all following us!  Keep ’em coming!

beautiful Georgia!

Mike in the rain - great rainsuit and pack cover!

our first plates at Daniel's

Chatuge Lake in Hiawassee, GA