Today's Miles 11.2. AT miles 735.2
Back on the trail today after our rest day. We had a late start from the motel, about 11am. It felt strange setting off leaving most of our bubble of friends behind. Milk Monster and Wall E arrived a day later than the rest of us, delayed a day when Milk Monster was ill so were taking a zero day today. Iron Man was still feeling unwell so the five lads took a second zero day today. Hopefully there'll be no more sickness amongst us. There's definitely something causing it though, we'll never know what. It could be a number of things, contaminated water, bad hygiene, infected shelters etc. The scout group we passed a couple of days ago were also at the motel last night and were heading home early today due to sickness too. Trish and Jesse headed off ahead of us doing a 26 mile slack pack day. Slack packing is when you carry just a day pack and get your main pack transported on for a fee usually. Carrying less weight theoretically means that you can do bigger miles. Hopefully we'll see everyone again on the trail again in a few days time, I'm sure they'll catch us up, our pace has slowed a bit with my dodgy knee.
So today we had the trail to ourselves , we saw no one else today, a big change from the busy weekend of people we just experienced. It was a beautiful clear sunny day again, quite a bit cooler though. We made a 1.4 mile detour, there and back, to Troutville Post Office to send our winter gear up the trail in a bounce box. It's not a cheap service but it saves us carrying the extra weight of items we are no longer using. So altogether we actually walked 12.6 miles today.
Spring has sprung in the lower elevations, everywhere is really pretty with blossom, the higher elevations have yet to catch up. The cows have been put out to pasture and there are some beautiful butterfly's around too. I managed to get a photo of a Eastern Tiger Swallowtail today, a beautiful large bright yellow butterfly. The trail was pretty easy today, good paths with nice gentle ascents and descents, we had quite a few streams to cross though. We arrived at Wilson Creek shelter at 5pm. No one else was there in the shelter but we still decided to camp in our tent, with all the sickness going around we're more likely to escape it if we stick to our tent.
Nigel read the shelter register and noticed an entry from 'Hutch' and 'Margarita and Treebeard'. We are guessing Hutch is one of the two lads, John and Matt, we met a few days ago and yet to get trail names who we nicknamed Team 118 or Starsky and Hutch. We guess that they have taken Starsky and Hutch as their trail names. Also last night Nigel jokingly said Trish and Jesses trail names should be Margarita and TreeBeard (they still haven't got trail names either) so it looks like they've adopted those names too. Nigel's getting good at giving out trail names. He gave Isabelle the Irish girl her trail name 'Roadrunner'. We keep seeing her entries in the trail registers too, she's fast and now two weeks ahead of us.
A hiker came in later to the shelter, Ravencloud, we've not met him before but he has apparently been two or three days behind us for the last month. He'd seen our entries in the trail registers. He seemed a nice guy, maybe well cross paths over the next few days.
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