April 19

Orion

I'm still on trail time, so out of habit I was up at 630am.  Went across the street to do laundry.  Clean clothes....oh yeah!  Breakfast skillet at the Smoky Mountain diner was perfection.  Spent the day walking around town, doing standard town chores.  Email, facebook, journal updates at the library.  Checked out the outfitter.  Post office.  All that good stuff.  Town is like a magnet.  Actually more like a black hole.  You see everyone there.  It's hard to escape.  I ended up seeing dozens of people that I had met in the last few weeks.  Some had been there a few days, some were still rolling in behind me.  KB caught back up.  Great to see him again, and to see some of his new gear purchases.  A bunch of our Georgia crowd all had dinner and drinks at the tavern, then people started heading off to their respective hotels or hostels.  As the big Trail Fest was starting tomorrow, many of the rooms were already booked up.  I still hadn't made arrangements to stay in town, so I made my way down the sidewalk, err trail, north of town, in the dark.  Total hobo style again, across the tracks, jumped the rail, and headed down the trail down by the river.  Under normal circumstances this would be totally unacceptable.  But not on the trail.  It's good to change your definition of normal.  I ran into Rocketman, Bambam, Tink, and Apollo.  I was trying to find the constellation Orion, as I have a habit of doing, but I was unsuccessful.  I don't have a trail name yet, but in talking about Orion, that came up as a possibility.  Apollo and Tink approved.  So I'm going with that, and I'll see if that sticks.  I'm also on a mission to find a small mirror ball.  Trying to spice up the shelter atmosphere at night.  We'll see how that goes, haha.  The river is raging now due to all the rain.  Thai  Dye, Apollo, Tink, and I were all camped right along the trail next to the roaring rapids for the night.  I slept with my food bag for the first time too.  I didn't get eaten by a bear (obviously).  Technically, I did a nero today, since I had to hike 0.9 to make camp.  Definitely need to revisit Hot Springs.  It's a really small, but really cool town.  Many of the residents are hikers that never left.

The AT through Hot Springs.