Day 7, 8, 9, 10

Haven't had good service in a while and my phone didn't have much battery so I've been slacking on the blogging. 

Day 7:

After a fairly cold night, we spent the morning sleeping in. We didn't hit the trail until 10:45 AM. I made a small fire in the morning to help warm myself up. We hiked to the next shelter, made camp, and spent the evening reading (this has become a common theme of how we spend our evenings).

Day 8:

We got going a little earlier and hiked into Unicoi gap. There were two separate groups serving up trail magic. One was a church group serving hotdogs and hamburgers, and the other was an outdoor enthusiasts club, and they were serving free food and beer. I ended up having a Milwaukee's best and a ton of food which made hiking the rest of the day fairly easy (due to lots of carbs, not the alcohol, which was barely detectable). We hiked up Tray mountain and setup camp at the shelter there. We didn't get much sleep because the wind was so loud. I woke up several times during the night and could have swore I was by the ocean. 

Day 9:

Another day enshrouded by fog. The worst part about hiking in the rain / fog is once you reach the summit of a mountain you've been hiking for hours, you can't  the see the beautiful landscape you would normally be able to see on a clear day. We got up early (as per last weeks retrospective) and arrived at our next shelter by 1:00 PM. Fortunately, the bubble of hikers we started out with are a day ahead of us, so Deeo Gap shelter was almost empty. There was a guy there taking a zero day and later in the day, a couple from Finland stopped by that I hadn't seen since Gooch gap. We all sat around and chatted until dark. It was one of the better evenings I've had socializing with other hikers. 

The other reason the shelter was fairly empty was that a lot of people got off the trail due to the predicted bad weather. We opted to keep going because if we got off the trail every time  there was a 30% chance of thunderstorms, we would  never finish it. It did rain fairly hard and there was thunder and lightening, but we both slept really well. 

Day 10:

We woke up at 7:00 AM and were hiking by 8:00. We needed to be to Dicks creek gap by 11:00 to catch a shuttle into Hiawassee, GA. We got to the gap by 10:00 and the shuttle didn't arrive until 11:20, so we got plenty of time to sit around and talk to other hikers. 

Once we got to town, we checked into our motel and ordered a pizza. We don't have a scale to weigh ourselves, but we can tell we are both losing weight, which is no surprise. We ran a serious calorie deficit this last week, which we plan to correct with our resupply for the next week. 

We also ate at a southern style buffet called Daniels. It was really mediocre, but it was worth it for the atmosphere, which can only be described as southern kitsch. We plan on taking a zero day tomorrow and to be back on the trail by Sunday. Sunday will be our last day in Georgia and we will end up camping in North Carolina that night. Georgia was beautiful and I'm going to miss it.