My dad and I woke up at 630 this morning to get on the road to give him enough time to get me dropped off and to make his way to a meeting near Atlanta. We stopped for breakfast at mcdonalds, my favorite.
There are two ways to get to the starting point of the trail, either go to a state park and hike an 8 mile approach trail, or drive 1 mile down the trail and hike back 1 mile to start. I decided on the later and as we were driving on the most back country dirt roads ever(as my sister victoria would say) we found a tree blocking the way. So now instead of having my dad walk the first mile with me I had to hike an extra 4.5 miles to get to where we should have been able to drive the car.
At near the same time we got there, their were two other guys heading to springer mountain also. Their names are Bob and Jeff, two highschool friends, now in their mid thirties, out for 10 days of fun together on the AT. They are really good guys and we spent all day traveling together.
The weather today was cold, rainy and windy. My gps in my phone couldn't get a signal through all of the fog. Luckily the trail is very obvious with its white blazes all over the place!
My first day was supposed to be a relatively easy 8.8 miles and turned into a pretty challenging 13 miles. There are a LOT of people here tonight, the shelter is full and there are about 15 tents setup around the shelter. I am staying in my tent tonight to try to get to bed early as there many others want to chat because they are so excited. Not that I'm not but I'm also pooped, these are real mountains here, nothing like we have in missouri.
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