Hot Springs, NC

3-29-2007 - It's going to be really hard to leave this town. We spend so many days without showering and doing laundry that we really smelled like hikers when we rolled into town on Tuesday morning. But, since the AT actually goes right through the center of Hot Springs, they are used to it. We went directly to the Smokey Mountain Diner and ate mounds of toast and home fries. Before we were served, the waitress brought out a binder of letters and drawings from the 4th graders of the town. They had adopted the 3 miles of trail leading into town, and the letters were all about the hike their class went on, as well as questions for thru-hikers. Some of the questions included:

1) Do you have a real home?
2) Where do you go to the bathroom?
3) Have you seen any animals, or dangerous animals?

We were delighted and wrote letters back.

We are still hiking with Flick, and we met up with another married couple, Shadow (who takes a picture of his every day) and Numb Toe (figure it out). They are from North Carolina and have many excellent stories to tell. Shadow loves to sit around a campfire.
We did our first "slack-packing" while in town. Flick's parents drove us to a place where the trail crosses the road and we hiked from there back to Hot Springs... without our giant packs. We did 15 miles in about 6 hours and M (also known as Monkey, now) even stopped to take about a million pictures of wildflowers, which are starting to come up everywhere.
We are staying in the cutest little cottage by the creek here. If I had endless money, I think I would stay here forever.
I'm sitting here drinking a Sun Drop and eating potato chips, listening to Willie's Choice, which is one of the channels on satellite TV, that plays music picked by Willie Nelson. Does it get any better?

Next stop will be Erwin, TN.

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K