Hey!

Day 1: Atlanta

Strangely cosmopolitain compared to what I had expected. We got here pretty early and had a few hours to kill. Petek had looked up the location of an REI before we left so that we could get any last minute things and pick up some fuel. We easily found the right bus and took a gorgeous walk in a heavily planted and southern looking neighborhood, guided by the old smarty phone, which led us straight to the address of.. some person's lovely house just past an odd little industrial area. Aaaand adventure #1. So then we booked it over to the train station so we could catch our train out to Gainesville. Petek had arranged through couchsurfing to stay at the house of some lovely people that turned out to be AWESOME. They fed us and we chatted a long while (they had traveled all around europe for months so had all sorts of fascinating stories) and we took our last showers for a while.

 

Day 2: Approach Trail

So we got a ride from our hosts to the greyhound station to pick up our shuttle to the trail from 'hot rock', a nice hiker guy who travels around and shuttles around hikers and was full of great advice. At the amicalola falls building there were some pretty special outdoors dioramas with all the creatures you might meet along the trail in a little menagerie of zombified fur and feathers. Very cute. Also a bunch of live snake displays, I guess to show people what a rattlesnake looks like vs. a rat snake. We headed out of here in high spirits that we'd somehow managed to not have ridiculously heavy packs, despite not really shaving off too many luxuries (39# for me, 31# for petek).

 

Day 3+: The day(s) we stopped paying attention to what day it is/was/willbe

Well, we appear to be moving along pretty well, hopefully we'll hit the GA-NC border tomorrow. Met all sorts of interesting people along the way - tons of people that appear to make this trail their entire life, and sometimes they look it. We've been lucky enough to get great weather thus far - clear skies and relative warmness except for one crazy thunderstorm that we viewed from the dry comfort of a shelter on the trail. Wow time flies when you have like 20 minutes to write stuff in the library...