May 31 - Overmountain Shelter to Mountaineer Shelter

Yay pictures!

All the pictures of the mountains are from this morning. Talk about a great way to start the day!

Balds are the best part of the trail and Hump and Little Hump Mountain are no exception. Climbing mountians is so much like life. You climb and you climb and most of the time your efforts are not rewarded. But sometimes you are and not only is it pretty, it's gorgeous, beautiful, breathtaking, heart stopping, awe-inspiring, mind-blowing. Every time I cannot believe I am here. I stand there with my mouth hanging open.

So after a couple of weeks of bouncing back and forth across the North Carolina/Tennessee border we are finally done with North Carolina! And soon we will be in Virginia!

We had planned on eating lunch at a restaurant half a mile down a road that crosses the trail, but we called and they were not open. But I was promised lunch! Lucky for me a mother and daughter were being picked up and gave us a ride to a pizza place 2 miles down the road. Yummmm! While we were there I was able to update my blog a bit and finally got in contact with the newspaper reporter.

Because we had 9 more miles to hike and we had already wasted too much time at the pizza place, we called for a shuttle to the trail from a nearby hostel. This saved us atleast an hour, which we needed every minute of due to our full bellies slowing us down.

The footbridge pictured below shows our 400th mile! :D

We saw 2 more snakes, which brings the count to 8 or 9. Yuck.

We arrived at the shelter as it was getting dark, but we were still full so we didn't need the light to cook anyway. This shelter was fancy, it had three levels! Will and I lucked out and got the top level, but we had to share... with a wooden carved bear!