Days 13 - 19

We are in Gatlinburg today spending our first zero day. I would have liked to wait a bit longer, but the last few days have done a number on the tendons of our feet, and we pushed longer miles yesterday so we could spend a day in town. We got a maildrop from Tom and Brenda with our first resupply. It saves us some cash and time so ee can explore the town. So that's what we're doing today, day 19.

Day 13: 144.0 miles, 8.3 today. Today was a great and terrible day. We hiked an easy mile into the NOC, ate breakfast and ordered pizza to go there, and spent a few hours uploading thee last blog post your read. That was great. But hiking uphill for 7.5 miles in cold, while in a less than sober state was less good. And Jesse hates ups. Oh man, it was bad. Nite hiking into the shelter, cold...ugh.

Day 14: 155.2, 11.2 today. The cold clouds and wind formed gorgeous, what the Brits call whore ice, I think cuz it grows sideways on the branches. The ice grew like stalactite crystals on either side of the branch or leaf it grew on. I've got pics on my camera, sometimes using them makes posting these blog posts difficult, so well see if I can share them today. Anyway, we camped in a bunch of this ice, which fell through the course of the day.

Day 15: 165.8, 10.6 today
We hiked into Fontana today. You have to stay in a shelter once you enter the smoky mountains, so we had to do shorter than our preferred 12 to 13 mile days the last few days. The shelter at the entrance has showers, and they were amazing! Firts shower since day ten. We supplied in the one open store in Fontana, which had beer on tap and made to order personal pizzas and hot dogs. Yep, you guessed it, we ate lunch there and had a couple beers. We even bought Busch light for the shelter. We bought our permits for the national park and proceeded to the shelter.

Day 16: 179.6 miles,13.8 today. The shelters in the smoky mtns have fireplaces in them. We stayed with the British couple from timeoutadventures.co.UK, and a few others. It was fun to meet the brits since I'd read their blog before we left and they had been just ahead of us for days.

Day 17: I had bad dreams and so had trouble getting motivated the first few hours. It was downright yucky. But we stopped for lunch, the sun came out, and my full belly helped turn the day around. We hiked 1.7 miles short of our planned day, but it was because we knew the next shelter was full. As it ended up, we had a shelter, complete with jesse-made fire, all to ourselves (okay, and the mice).

Day 18: we hiked 12.5 miles, the last 7 or so with a German named Heiko. We got trail magic in the form of stickers from a couple doing a section hike, it was 65 degrees and sunny, and when we arrived at newfound gap, a couple - Godspeed and Mountain Mama- greeted us with sandwiches, fruit, pop, and a free ride into Gatlinburg!

That who knows what today will bring, but we are looking forward to a day without walking (too much).