Day 76 Canal Towpath, Knoxville to Pine Knob Shelter

Today's miles 20.  AT miles 1042.5

It rained during the night last night so we were glad we were in a motel. A decent continental breakfast was included with our stay, we had cereal, pastries and waffles.  A really nice good value motel, the young lad running it was very friendly and helpful, shame it's not closer to the trail. We left the motel just after 9am and walked the mile back down the road to rejoin the trail.  It was another warm sunny day.  The trail took us uphill initially to around 1000ft along a ridge line, Harpers Ferry was at quite low elevation, 275ft. 

We passed Gathland State Park and a War Correspondents Monument.  We passed quite a lot of historical Civil War areas, buildings and informative signs today, Nigel read some of them.  If he'd stopped to read them all we'd never have got anywhere.   The trail gradually climbed up to 1750ft, we don't go much higher than that for a while now on the trail, we're in the lowest third of the trail.  We passed a Ridge Runner, trail name Kite, today, the first ridge runner we've seen since The Smokies.  We had a nice chat to him, he was out leading a group of hikers.  

About 3pmish we passed Dahlgren backpack campground where we stopped for a half hour snack break and refilled our water.  We let our feet breath for a bit, removing our boots and socks, something we'll have to do more often during the day now the weather warming up.  There was one other thru hiker camping there, Fancypants who we'd not met before.  We were nearly tempted to stay, it was a nice campground with picnic tables, toilets and showers, all free.

We carried on though as planned a further six miles to Pine Knob shelter passing another tourist attraction, Washington Monument and crossing a caged bridge over interstate 70. We arrived just before 6pm, there were a couple of other section hikers there.  We pitched our tent in a tent pad and enjoyed the last of the evening sun.  It got a bit chilly when the sun went down, just recently it's been warm during the day but gets quite cold still at night.