Erwin TN

Thursday morning we woke up with only a six mile walk into Erwin to resupply on food. We made it to the outskirts of town by around 10:20 and were surprised to find about 15 other hikers just hanging out at a hostel right off the trail. We then realized that there would be a shuttle going the two miles into town around 11:30. The shuttle would take people to the center of town where there would be a dollar store, IGA, and most importantly an all you can eat pizza buffet!  This all sounded great except for the part where we would need to sit there for an hour waiting and for the part where the shuttle cost $5 per person. After discussing pros and cons we decided to start walking the two miles into town and hopefully get picked up. We figured the worse thing that could happen would be that nobody would pick us up and we would arrive in town around the same time as the shuttle. We ended up walking a little over half way into town before getting picked up. We were then able to get our shopping done and arrive at the pizza buffet only slightly after the rest of the hikers who had come in the shuttle. After stuffing our stomachs as full as we could stand we had to sit there for a while before we felt we had the ability to walk again. We then hitched a ride back to the trail. The best part of our morning, apart from the pizza, was that we saved $10 dollars by not taking the shuttle!! :) We decided we would hike about 10 more miles and call it a day. Friday morning we woke up to chilly weather and quickly packed up and began hiking to warm up. We had one bigger up but apart from that the day was decently easy and we felt like we made good time. We had decided we would hike 10 miles to a road crossing and then stop for lunch. Whenever we see that we have a road crossing coming up we always hope that we will get trail magic, especially on the weekends. We were not disappointed. As we came up to the road we saw a big white van and a group of hikers sitting around eating. We were quickly invited over by Rob who told us to grab a soda and as many snacks as we wanted! We very excitedly took him up on his offer and were soon contentedly sipping cans of soda and eating granola bars, honey buns, cookies, apples, candy and more, we figured that we easily each ate over 1,000 calories. Rob was such a nice guy and kept urging us to take more and then gave us his number in case we ever needed anything. He said that he is at that road crossing almost every day and usually takes the last few hikers of the day home with him so they can shower, do laundry and stay in a nice bed. So cool! We want to be like him when  we grow up:) anyways, we hiked about 6.6 more miles before calling it a day around 4:30. Even though we were able to go 16.6 miles it felt like a really short day especially since we quit a little earlier than usual, but we figured that our bodies would appreciate a long relaxing evening.

-Zae

Rob and trail magic