Day 4, 6-18

We made it 12 miles this day and considered it really good, which is ironic later, but for now, 12 starting out is very good. I had the first of a few days of knee scare of my own. I had tweaked my left knee fairly badly in a half marathon last December, and it had started to act up a wee bit on general principle. I strapped on the knee brace and kept favoring it. It improved a lot after a few days of the knee brace, but for a while Caleb and I were worried that we were going to have to leave the trail. The plan at that point was to hitchhike home rather than call anyone, to continue an adventure although it would have been a different sort of adventure from what we had set out to do. It was a day filled with cathedral-esque trees.

Caleb and I ran into this great guy, whose trail name was Rock Dancer, during the latter half of this day. We stopped and talked with him for about a half hour or so. Earlier that day we had passed Mark and Gretchen, then passed these two college guys, but they all passed us as we talked with this guy. He gave us a lot of really good advice on hitchhiking, water, and other general trail stuff. We figured that it was ok to trust his word, since he was wrapping up his second thru-hike in a few days. We were pretty impressed. His legs looked huge, like he could walk through a brick wall and not notice.

That's Caleb in the picture there. You can see the crocs. I thought this was a really awesome picture. That's what the trail looked like some of the time. Others, it was really overgrown, but never impossible to find.









It was like this, for the trees, for this entire day. Pretty awe-inspiring. I loved it.





























Some mountains in GA that wouldn't fit in one picture. I'll have a lot of these when I get to the Smokies...gorgeous area, that.



C and I. I don't know where we are, or why we're happy, but we are. And it's great.












I'm tired. And this Tree is growing out of a rock. Both pretty neat.












C and I as Babushkas. We were at a shelter way far off the trail, and so it was pretty rarely frequented. It was really windy though, and it started to get a little chilly.



Dinner...some sort of quick pasta with pre-flavoring. Yum. But it isn't bad, and on the trail, you eat anything and everything.