Date: 2017-09-18
From: Harrison Ground spring

To: Buchanan Trail junction
Miles today: 18.8

Thru-hiking is not supposed to be terribly complex: you eat when you're hungry, drink when you're thirsty, hike until you're tired and camp where there's water. The simplicity of life out here is part of the appeal.But the fact we're camping tonight in the middle of a 10-mile dry stretch shows there are exceptions to this rule. There's one word that explains this: Bojangles.I hadn't heard of this southern restaurant chain but the starry-eyed expressions that North Carolina natives Sriracha and Sweetblood adopt at any mention of the name suggests this local franchise is something special. Seriously, Pavlov could have elicited a greater salivatory response using the name of this restaurant than he ever did with his bell.All this is in keeping with the aphorism that the landmarks on the first half of any thru-hike tend to be geographical -- lakes, mountains etc -- but on the second half they tend to revolve around food. Looking ahead, we realised we were about 45 miles out from this beacon of southern cuisine, which meant two roughly 20-mile days and then a five-mile cruise into Daleville, home of the northernmost Bojangles on the Appalachian Trail.And what that meant for us today was stopping in the middle of a long dry section, requiring us to camel up with several kilograms of water to haul up the hill to one of the few shelters on the trail that doesn't have a water source attached to it.It didn't help that we adopted our usual Team KRT stance by hiking slowly in the morning, with lots of long breaks, and then hauling ass in the afternoon at a time we should have been having more frequent breaks and when we'd certainly appreciate them more. Part of this is because most of the tramily members are, like me, definitely not morning people. Sriracha and Sweetblood didn't manage to leave camp today until 8.20am.And, to be fair, there was an exogenous reason why progress was halted within a few miles today -- we ran into a military guy living in DC who was hiking for a few days and insisted on plying us with freshly brewed coffee at a lookout.Even before that, I was halted by the enticing and deeply photogenic scene of the sun streaming through the last bit of cloud enveloping the hills.Then the trail emerged from the trees to excellent views at Apple Orchard Mountain. Given our plundering of apple trees at abandoned farms in the previous few days, we expected more of the same on this mountain but nominative determinism failed to affect reality and this was a hilltop distinctly devoid of fruit.It was at this point, having covered just five miles by midday and realising that we needed to do nearly three times as far in the afternoon to put us in position to get our intended mileage to set us up for Bojangles.The second half of the day was a more perfunctory affair compared to the indulgent laziness of the first part. With the hoary breath of a deadline at our necks, we hauled ass to Thunder Hill shelter for lunch. We discovered this was only 0.2 miles off the Blue Ridge Parkway, which explained a clearly non-hiking couple who were present. They were nice enough though, and particularly when they shared the rest of their lunch with us. Then it was time for ass-hauling mode, leading to a creek where we filtered water to take up to the dry shelter above. I vacillated about whether to camp next to this water and catch up with the others tomorrow and farewelled the others but then the business of the road and the placement of the campsites right next to it made me change my mind. I camelled up then camped halfway to the shelter. Life is good.AT fact of the day: Today we hit the northern extent of Bob Peoples -- a legendary AT figure -- graffiti, with a shelter saying that "When Bob Peoples drives a car off the lot, it increases in value".