Today's miles 11 AT miles 69.6
It was a bit cloudier to start with this morning but the sky's did clear mid morning and we had another sunny day hiking, but with a cold wind.
Chainsaw was first up and out of camp very early. We started hiking at 9am. We planned a shorter mileage day today so we could head into Hiawassee town from Dicks Creek Gap and do a food resupply in the afternoon. We said goodbye to Matt and Karl, they were hiking on further today, we hope to catch up with them again further down the trail.
The same familiar trails lead us through the woods, we passed some interesting trees along route early on. We had our first two 'knobs' to climb up today, Young Lick Knob and Kelly Knob where we caught up with Chainsaw. We had a quick chat with him, and wished him the best then carried on our way. He was taking it slower. With just under 4 miles to go to reach the gap we telephoned the Budget Inn in Hiawassee to reserve a room for the night and then phoned Joyce & Sally, for a shuttle Ride into town. (ask any hostel for their phone number).
We reached Dicks Creek Gap just before 1.30pm and Joyce arrived just minutes later to pick us up. They do a great service shuttling hikers around for a small fee. She had kindly picked a parcel up for us that was waiting for us at Blueberry Patch Hostel and before dropping us off at the Budget Inn she gave us a quick tour of Hiawassee so we knew where everything was.
Our parcel contained goodies from our sponsor, Uncle Fool's Jerky Smokehouse. We are delighted to be members of their 2014 thru hike team. In exchange for promoting their products we get jerky supplies sent to us along the trail. Our first package had all sorts of goodies in it; beef and turkey jerky, 2 packs of dehydrated meals (another line they want to add to the Uncle Fools brand), candy, drinks powders and our team t-shirts.
We checked into our room at the Budget Inn (more like a motel) and jumped straight in the shower! So nice! Once clean we headed down the road for something to eat. Hiawassee is a one street town. We had burger and chips, the first of many I suspect on this trip, at Hardees, a fast food joint, they tasted good. We then went to Ingles supermarket to do our food resupply for the next six days, a great grocery store, lots of choice.
Back to our room it took us about an hour to split and repackage all our food into plastic bags and daily portions for 6 days. Whilst sorting the food we also got all our smelly clothes laundered!
So nice to feel clean and wear clean clothes!
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