Another lovely warm, about 17°C, sunny day with a nice cool breeze and a very big mileage day for us. We also passed the 600 mile mark!
Trubrit cooked breakfast for all the hikers, eggs, bacon and pancakes plus coffee. I don't drink coffee and he actually had some PG Tips teabags so he made me a proper English cup of tea. The American tea is quite weak compared to ours. After breakfast Dave, his friend, shuttled us back the couple of miles to the trail.
The paths on the trail today were steady going, gentle ups and downs along a long ridge way. We had originally planned to walk 19 miles to Jenny Knob Shelter. A nice shelter with a proper roof rather than corrugated metal and very fancy anti-mice chandeliers. We arrived at the shelter just after 4pm. Tomorrow's forecast is for rain all day so we decided to take advantage of the nice weather again today and continue further on so that we have less miles to walk tomorrow in the rain, a 15 mile day instead of 21 miles to Woods Hole Hostel. We stopped about half a mile after the shelter at a stream for a short rest and to top up on water. We walked another 6.4 miles altogether to Kimberling Creek Suspension Bridge where we arrived just before seven and set up tent next to the bridge and river. We were both quite tired by then, my right thigh started hurting on the last downhill section, hopefully I haven't strained a muscle and it'll be fine in the morning after a nights rest. We had been pushing ourselves a bit today, walking faster than normal on the easier terrain, averaging around 3 mph, we are normally around 2.5 mph.
We weren't too sure if the water from the small river was safe by just boiling it for cooking. The river runs parallel to a road so is probably contaminated so we took extra precaution and added iodine, not the nicest tasting! We had mice alert around our tent during the night too. I saw a mouse run up and over between our tent inner and outer! And as forecast it started raining continuely and quite heavy from about 2am.
We saw a couple more wild flowers today, Common Blue Violet and Round-lobed Hepatica as far as we can make out from our wildflower guide.
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