Today's miles 16.9. AT miles 1097.9
Woo Hoo - a big day today, we passed the half way mark!
We'd set our alarm for 5:30am, Uff-da however had set his for 5am so we were woken then. It was still dark, it starts getting light around 5:30. We had our oatmeal packed up and were walking for 6:30am, our earliest start so far. It was a warm morning, 14°C, even at 6am and very very humid, 100% humidity. The forest felt almost tropical. It was also misty to start until the sun burnt through around 9am. The humidity does drop though during the day.
The trail was pretty easy again today, for the first ten miles we walked along a ridge called 'long flat pine ridge' and for the majority of the time it was just that, a level path through lovely cool pine forest. We passed Birch Run shelter and then after about eleven and a half miles of hiking at 10:20am we reached the 2014 half way mark - 1092.65 miles. No official sign just a laminate notice and marker penned tree. A couple of miles further down the trail there was an official mid-point sign but it is out of date, I'm not sure what year it was from. The trail length changes slightly each year due to trail rerouting.
From the half way mark we had just over five miles to go to reach Pine Grove Furnace State Park, home to the AT Museum and 'the half gallon challenge'! We passed some lovely holiday cabins on the way into the park. Another hiker tradition at Pine Grove Furnace Store, after passing half way, is to eat a half gallon of ice cream. We'd been looking forward to this challenge for the last few days and also since we first heard about it last year. We, and quite a few other hikers it would appear from the hiker register, were very disappointed to find the store closed! Our guide book told us it was open Friday to Sundays, today was a Friday.
We arrived at the store about 12:30pm. We were planning on staying at the Ironmasters Hostel next door to the store but that didn't open until 5pm. The AT Museum also wasn't open until tomorrow/Saturday, we did know about that, so we had a last minute change of plan as we didn't want to hang around bored for four hours. We had already planned on visiting the museum tomorrow/Saturday morning when it opened so we'll do the ice cream challenge in the morning too, if the shop has it in stock! Its a shame, ice cream challenge eating would have been nicer/easier on a sunny afternoon after a long hike rather than at 10am in the morning after breakfast.
Holly Inn, Restaurant and Tavern in Mt. Holly Springs about ten miles away offers a free ride to/from Pine Grove Furnace State Park if you stay. So we decided to stay there instead. At 2pm, Cindy the owner came to pick us up, a lovely lady, she said she has quite a few hikers stay and we're glad we did too, for $55 for two the rooms are lovely and also have an outdoor seating area. Much much nicer than staying in a hostel. There was also a launderette and Family Dollar store nearby so we could get our laundry and food resupply done.
Early evening we had a delicious meal in the Holly Inn's bar area. Nigel had steak and chips and I had their homemade meatballs and spaghetti, we both slipped down a small creme brulé for dessert. The bar had live music starting at 9pm which would have been good to stay for, sadly though we headed back to our room, being up since 5am and having a poor nights sleep thd previous night we were really tired and ready for bed by 8.30pm.
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