We had a really great day today, old school houses, trail magic, wild flowers, ice cream and we passed the quarter way mark!
It was raining when we woke up but by the time we'd got our 8:45 shuttle back to Mt Rogers visitor centre and started hiking at 9:15 it had stopped. We had a few very light rain showers with sunny spells in the morning but it turned into a lovely hot sunny afternoon again.
The mornings hike through the woods was pretty normal AT terrain, we hiked with Wall E and Milk Monster for the first couple of hours until they stopped for a snack break. We carried on stopping a bit later at Chatfield shelter for a quick snack. There we met G Walker again, we met him briefly at the visitors centre shelter yesterday. A nice guy, recently retired, an AT thru hike was the first thing to do on his 'bucket list'.
A couple of miles later things started to get more interesting. We walked under some very noisy electric pylons/power lines shortly after arriving at 'Lindamood School'. An old one room school house from 1894 to 1937 now part of a museum. There were old framed samples of the list of punishments and how many lashings the children would get for each misdemeanour and another one with the rules for teachers which were quite amusing. There was also some trail magic left inside the school house. 'Friends of Spark' had left cans of Mountain Dew and some individual cakes and sandwiches. We shared a drinks can and had a cake each.
Another three miles further on and we came to a busy interstate/road junction where there was a gas station/truck stop. We stopped and brought a drink and some 'ice cream'. Our first ice cream so far since being here in the States. We sat on some large rocks behind the gas station relaxing in the sun eating our ice creams, they were delicious. We bumped into Meeple and Odysseus at the gas station too, we'd not seen them for a few days, they were staying at a hostel next door.
We went over a couple of short but interesting boardwalks today and saw our first spring wildflowers, Bloodroot, Dogtooth Violet and Common Wood Sorrel all in a similar area on the sunny side of a wood. From the gas station we had another 6 miles to go to get to our camp spot for the night. It was a very warm afternoon, the uphills were hard work today in the heat with our heavier resupplied packs and there were a few quite steep but shortish climbs towards the end of the day. We passed two separate southbound thru hikers, Fireball first at Davis path campsite and then White Sauce not long before we reached camp at Crawfish Trail campsite at 5:45. No shelter just a nice camp spot next to a lovely babbling stream. Wall E and Milk Monster arrived about an hour later and then about 8pm two American section hikers, Shortcut and Bull, turned up. We always arrive in camp before our German friends, not because they are slower hikers than us but because we have different hiking styles. They like to take regular rest/snack break's every 90 minutes or so, we however tend to snack as we are walking and not stop so often, preferring to keep going and get into camp earlier and rest up then.
Just as we were going to sleep it started thundering and lightening, then about half an hour later a heavy rain shower. The storm continued on and off throughout the night, but it was a mild night.
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