Date: 2013-10-08
From: Deep Gap Shelter

To: Standing Indian Shelter
Miles today: 20.3
Weather: scattered clouds

Around 5 this morning, I was woken up by a bit of commotion in the shelter. It seemed like three of the guys were packing up to leave. I noted that it was raining, and figured they were just hardcore, early-risin', rain-walkin' kinda fellas, so I rolled over and went back to sleep.When I woke up in the morning, I was surprised to find the three guys still there, only sleeping much closer to me now. When they got up, they explained what happened. The shelter had lofted areas on each side, and the guy with the husky took his dog up into one of the lofts with him. This morning, the dog went into a corner and peed, right onto the guy below him. Needless to say, there was some tension this morning while we were all packing up. Normally I would hike out of such an awkward situation ASAP, but it was still raining, so I stayed in the shelter and waited in the silence. As soon as it stopped raining, I booked it out of there - I had a breakfast buffet to attend.When I got to the road, the only thing standing between me and breakfast was a hitch, but there weren't any cars going in the right direction! Eventually, a truck with a trailer came flying by, and I was surprised when, 2 minutes later, he came back in the other direction and pulled into the parking area. He was heading toward the Nantahala gorge on business, traveling from South Carolina, and he was willing to hitch me the 11 miles into Hiawassee - cool! When I got to the breakfast buffet, it turned out that they only had it on weekends and mornings they felt like could get particularly busy, so I just ordered a large breakfast platter of bacon and eggs. After, I headed to the outfitter - I needed a small equipment repair - and ended up looking at all of the warm winter clothes, though I knew I didn't need any. I managed to leave all the fancy merchandise behind, headed to the grocery store for a quick resupply, then caught a ride back to the trail. Shannon, the man who picked me up, started telling me a story about how he had his license taken away when he was in his 20's because he had epilepsy and hit a telephone pole. I became nervous. He then explained that he got it back when he had the right temporal lobe of his brain removed. This was meant to be reassuring, and we made it to the trail without event. He even gave me his telephone number with instructions to call if I ran into any trouble on the rest of my journey!Hiking along this afternoon, I met Doug, a long distance section hiker who had flip-flopped to Springer like me, except he came from Damascus instead of Hot Springs. Like me, he was a runner and cyclist, and I found out he had lived in Nashville and biked and ran many of the same routes I had! I would have loved to keep hiking with him, but he stopped short and I kept going to set myself up for heading into Franklin tomorrow. When I got to Standing Indian shelter, I wished I had stayed with him and the two other hikers at his shelter; mine had no other hikers to help scare the boogy man away!!The good part about heading on to Standing Indian was that a number of barriers were broken in one svelte swoop: I left Georgia, after only spending 3.5 days there; I crossed the 2,000 mile marker; and by crossing that marker, I knew I had less than 200 miles to go!