Yesterday we woke up to a beautiful sunny morning! We quickly gathered our things together and bid farewell to our friend ranger. We set off down the trail wondering when we would reach the dreaded "blood mountain". As it turns out it was not as bad as we were expecting. Yes it was extremely high and took us a while to reach the top but the climb was fairly gradual with enough switchbacks to keep out legs from giving out. Upon arriving at the top we enjoyed a beautiful view and a lunch of tuna and peanut butter with our new friend Neon. After a 2 mile hike down the other side of the mountain we arrived at Neal's Gap. This place is famous for shipping home un-wanted pounds for hikers. We took advantage of this and sent home several pounds of un-necessary things from our pack. We also used real toilets and even ate snickers! How much better could a day get? After this welcomed break we pressed on for several more miles giving ourselves a total of around 12.5 miles for yesterday. We were then able to camp with a group of people we had met along the trail. This morning we woke up to another beautiful day! It took us a little longer to get moving since we were about out of water and needed to spend some time filtering water from a near by creek. We use a ceramic filter pump (one of many options) which takes about five minutes to filter about 2 liters. In my mind this is simply way to long! Maybe God is trying to teach me patience :) Despite getting a later start we did manage to hike about 13.5 miles. In my case it was more like drag myself 13.5 miles. This whole hiking all day thing is kind of hard! :) We met many friendly hikers on the trail today and ate lunch with about 5 of them. We keep hoping to run into our friend Ranger again sometime, hopefully down the trail! Well it's getting close to 9 and that means bedtime :) Below is the pump we use and one of the many beautiful streams where we fetch water.
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