Trail To Damascus

     Wow it has been a long time since our last post, I am very sorry for that. We got to the point where we hadn't written anything in a while and we knew we were going to have a lot to say and I felt that I would just wait till I could get on a computer instead of write a long post on my cell phone. Needless to say this will be a long post but after you get through this one I am going to try my best to get daily posts back out there, even though you will probably see multiple posts on the same day due to the fact that I won't have data service to post them everyday.
     We left from Hot Springs about 2 and a half weeks ago and were able to get picked up by our new friends Michael and Debbie Rayl from Sams gap. They picked us up and we had a blast staying with them. They were great hosts taking us all over town taking care of all of our needs with gear and food. When they took us to the REI we were able to return then buy a lot of new equipment. Well I just returned shoes, Tabb returned almost everything that he had. The main changes were that Tabb switched to a hammock and we both switched to quick drying trail runner shoes from what we had before. Debbie and Michael were great sports and waited very patiently at the REI, I think we were in there for about 3 hours. Afterwards we went and picked up a couple pizzas at the Mellow Mushroom, which supposedly is a chain down here we have never heard of, it was delicious pizza. We went to church with them the next day and then kind of just slept all the rest of the day. Debbie took us back to the trail the next day after first stopping in Erwin, TN so that we could pick up some care packages that our mother and sister sent us (Sorry Aunt Donna we heard that you sent us some cookies there but we could not find the package anywhere, I'm sure they would have been delicious though). We really appreciated the hospitality that Debbie and Michael showed us and it was really great to meet them as new friends.
     We have been experiencing the most amount of rain on the trail within this last couple week stretch than we have so far on the entire trip. We left Sam's gap and were hiking better than ever now with our new shoes. It took us a couple of days to get to Erwin but we decided that we would skip right over the town since we had enough food to get to the next town following our plan. Its really hard to skip over a town when a cheeseburger is only a half a mile away. It turns out it was a good thing that we skipped that town because we heard from a lot of hikers that it was kind of a vortex and people were getting stuck there for days withought wanting to get back on the trail, and it gets expensive staying in towns like that.
     After we left Erwin we were heading into a pretty tough area of the trail with a lot of elevation change making the trail pretty tough. We hiked a couple of days meeting a lot of new people along the way since we were about a day or two behind the rest of our normal group. We left one day from an area named Cherry Gap Shelter were we planned to hike to a shelter named Roan Knob shelter at the end of a very hard climb up a mountain. I had been hiking in front of Tabb for the entire day ended up actually passing the shelter by about a mile and a half. The shelter sign was very hard to see and I hear that a lot of people actually hiked past it. The mile and a half that I hiked past the shelter was all down hill with fist sized gravel which was really hard to walk on. I got to the bottom of the hill where there was a parking lot when I realized I had hiked too far. I waited at the parking lot for about an hour and a half thinking that when Tabb saw that I wasn't at the shelter he would have realized I missed it and hiked down himself. Well, he didn't think that way and waited for an hour and a half before I decided to just hike a little bit further to a campsite that I saw on my map. The whole next 4 miles were walking across mountain top balds and I wanted to camp on top of one of them. As it turns out the camping spot I was trying to camp at was off a side trail that went a half mile off the trail. I wasn't going to do that so I decided to keep hiking. By this time I decided I wasn't very far from a really cool shelter that we had heard about but decided it was too far to get to that day so I decided just to go for it since I seemed to still have plenty of energy. When I got there the shelter was amazing, it was an old red barn that had been converted into an AT shelter and it had an awesome view (you can see pictures of it in the photo album). I ended up hiking an extra 7 miles past the shelter that Tabb and I had planned on staying at and I knew that he would be mad at me, however the view at that shelter made it worth it. I stayed at the shelter until I met back up with Tabb at around noon the next day and he was pretty mad that didnt hike back up the mile and a half to the shelter he was at when I realized I had gone too far. It was all right though because we had another beautiful day of hiking through mountain top balds.
     At the end of hour day we hiked into a beautiful bed and breakfast which also ran a hiker hostel called Mountain Harbor. It was a really cool house with horses and goats. They took the top of the barn and converted it into a hostel for hikers to stay at. We ended up just camping there however since the hostel was full, still being allowed to use the showers though. The next morning we had an amazing breakfast which the owner made (there is a picture in our album). We headed out of there around noon since it had rained at about 7am and we were all waiting for our things to dry out. Once we got out we started hiking with a small group who we have actually been hiking with for a little while now. There is Orca who is from Portland, Or, Dayglow who is from Massachusetts or  "Mass" as he says it, and Son who is from Washington state. Since the bed and breakfast we hiked through a really cool area with lots of waterfalls.
     After a few days we ended up at another hiker hostel called Kincora. Kincora is run by a man named Bob Peoples who is a legend on the AT. He built the entire hostel from logs that he dragged off the property. Bob Peoples is one of, if not the largest AT volunteers our there. He does work projects on the AT every Tuesday. We had a great time there and got to hear lots of stories and good advice from him and Baltimore Jack who was staying there helping Bob out during the busy season. We left there that next morning and headed down to Watuaga Lake. We hiked about 10 miles that day before we set up camp close to a rope swing which some local Hampton, TN boys put up. We had a blast swimming in the lake, going off the rope swing and just chatting with some of the locals.
     Once we left the lake we had a quick couple of days to enter into Virginia. We caught back up with some of the group that we had been hiking with before we met Son, and Dayglow (we have kind of been on and off with Orcha since Franklin, NC). We stayed the night at the shelter where they all were since it started raining as soon as we arrived. The next day we decided to push for Damascus. We did our first marathon day going just a little over 26.2 miles, I'll have to pick up my sticker when I get home. It was a hard day doing that many miles, oh and it rained the entire day as well. We stayed in Damascus that night at a hostel called The Place. The next day we were glad to hear that our awesome friend Ray Inman was able to get us a room at the Holiday Inn in Abingdon, VA which is only 10 miles from Damascus. So we hitched a ride into town and man did that hotel feel good!. We were able to walk about a mile down to the cinema in town and see the Avengers which was a great movie and a great break from the trail. Im planning on hiking about 10 miles today once we get back into Damascus.
     I updated the care package locations and also posted about 50 new pictures for everyone to look at. My father said that he was going to try and get everyone together up at Hall's Hovel around the weekend of the 9th and 10th of June as I am pushing to be hiking right through there at that time. I wanted to welcome anyone that wants to to come hike The Priest section of the trail with me just before that weekend. I plan on staying at The Priest shelter Thursday the 7th and then do the hike the next Friday, leaving around 8am. If you would like to do the hike with me I would recommend staying at the shelter the night before and hiking out with me in the morning. If you would like to do this try and contact me before and I'll let you know about what you'll need to bring and how we can organize it. Once again sorry for the long post and that its so late but I will from now on try and blog daily.

-Turbo Toes