Over 300 miles!

We made it to Erwin, TN. Mile number 339.9. It was pretty uneventful since we left Hot Springs. We did have the worst weather so far on Sunday night though. The wind was howling up to 50mph, and it was sleeting...pretty exciting in our tent. We attempted to bathe with some pond water the first night out of Hot Springs...it had been over a week since our last shower. We found the water to be extremely cold though!!!
We have found the most challenging part of the trail is going into town and getting food. Yesterday we arrived in Erwin...well 4 miles out of town on the trail. Nobody seemed to want to give us a ride into town, so we ended up walking to the Super 8. That is right...we are treating ourselves for the first time by staying at a real motel. It is great...bed, shower, tv, refrig, and microwave!!! After we got checked in we headed out to do our laundry and buy some food. We only took Nick's pack because we thought that would be plenty of room to carry everything. By the time we got done at the grocery store we had $215 worth of food...food we needed for 9 days on the trail and food we wanted to eat at the hotel. We had to walk 1.5 miles back to the hotel with all of this food and laundry. I was shell shocked for about 15 minutes. I could not comprehend how we were going to carry all of this food. Nick packed as much as he could in his pack, which left him carrying 3 heavy sacks in his hands and I had 5 sacks in my hands. It was a funny sight, but we felt like we really accomplished something when we got to the room. It is funny how hard it is to get around a pretty small town just with our feet.
Q&A:
Do we have trail names? I really have not taken the time to explain how important a trail name is to the majority of people on the trail. Most people seem to think of a name to call themselves before they even start hiking, but some wait to be given a name. At first I thought this was kind of dumb. It seemed to me that these people just wanted to escape their lives and the world by coming out into the woods and going by a different name. We were happy with Nick and Sara, but it seems to cause more issues by not having a name. When we introduce ourselves as Nick and Sara the conversation always starts out as, "You don't have trail names yet?" Plus we started thinking that going by a nickname is just another way to unite this little hiking community. Nick tried to adopt the name Barbaroja (Red Beard) that he had in South America, but people couldn't say it or remember it. We seem to be referred to as the couple from Texas and Kansas a lot, so we started calling ourselves Tex and Kansas...but I am not that excited about those names. One guy thinks Nick should go by Redwood, since he is tall and has red hair...so he is kind of going by Tex Redwood now. People have all sorts of names such as: Lefty, Bushwhacker, Frisbee, Chili, Hungry, Egghead, Starbucks, and Stink. I will take suggestions for my name if you have any.

What is "shine"? That would be good old moonshine. It is homemade alcohol made with corn meal, malt, water, yeast, and sugar.

Picture time:
The trail went right through the town of Hot Springs. They had these fancy engravings on the sidewalk to mark the trail.
Nick climbed on top of a crazy tower of rocks to take this picture of the French Broad River right outside of Hot Springs.
Nick on top of the rocks.
This is the crazy, steep path he had to take to get up the rocks. you can't tell but this is about a 70 degree angle. It was slipery and steep.

It has been rainy and foggy the last week. This is just another foggy and wet day on the trail.

A gravesite along the trail. We have seen about 10 gravesites or memorials along the trail for the past week. Most of the people have died in the early 1900's. They probably lived on this property before the forest service bought it.

This is the night of the worst weather we have had. Around 4:30pm we got our tents set up, and then it started the sleet. The wind was really strong! This is a picture of Peter's tent...it couldn't take the wind, so Nick and Peter built a wind block out of logs and leaves around it. That worked pretty well. Our tent held up really well without a block. Thankfully we were warm and dry inside. Our tent is the best.

The next morning we woke up to a beautiful sight. The trees were covered in frost. In this picture the sun is just reaching the tops of these trees lighting them up.

That morning we climbed Big Bald Mountain. We ran into two hikers that said they got lost on top of this bald the night before because it was a total white out. This is the view of the bald...you can see the side of the mountain that the sun has melted the frost on and how the west side is still frosty.

Me looking goofy on top of the bald. I was freezing...it was really cold and windy!!!!!!!

A beautiful view to have on a Monday morning.

Tuesday we were making our way down to Erwin, and we saw the first flowers of the season! I did not expect this since just the day before the ground was covered in frost. We are so excited for spring!!!!! It is going to beautiful to watch all the plants change!!