Date: 2017-10-15
From: Mountaineer Falls shelter

To: Missy's mountain house
Miles today: 8.8
Weather: few clouds

A day of fewer than nine miles would not normally require an early start but we're meeting Brian, Sriracha's university room mate, at lunchtime today to be taken to his aunt's mountain house for some time off trail.This was further exacerbated for me personally because I walk more slowly than my much younger companions, who have not yet worn out their joints through mountaineering, Telemark skiing and adventure racing. All this meant I left the campsite at 8.10am, while the others were still packing up, and enjoyed easy, quiet trail going gently downhill to a river. The trail followed this upstream until the trail headed steeply up a tributary valley.Midway up this tributary was Jones Falls, which was 0.1 miles away along a side trail, but the trail marker acted as an impromptu Yelp! review by being graffitied with admonitions such as "Worth it! GO!", "Epic!", "You are a fool if you miss this", "0.1 miles. Worth it!" and "Awesome".And it was indeed worth the side trip to see it.Soon after that the trail went from forests into more rural terrain, including going past an old cemetery and through pastures that looked semi-abandoned and seemed to be regenerating back to native bush. This regeneration process is what I'd expected of large sections of the AT, only to learn that regeneration has either gone on for long enough to create mature forest cover or for it to be relatively recent.After that it was easy terrain down to the road, where we found Rob, a trail angel who used to run a hostel in Massachusetts but now did trail magic at random moments for nobos and then sobos. He was a military veteran who stood out for having a mohawk and also a white van emblazoned with an image of the cartoon of Casper the friendly ghost on the side above the slogan "The friendly AT van." Combined with a couch in the back which he used to ferry hikers around, it was a mix of attributes that would have screamed out dodgy child abductor in any other situation but it says something about the culture of the AT that this was just normal. Most of the Second Breakfast Club were present and being ferried into town by Rob to resupply before heading on to the next shelter. A hint that this next section over the Roanoke balds was going to be a highlight came in the form of the large number of day and weekend hikers emerging from the mountains to the south.Brian arrived soon after and we were driven into North Carolina to stock up on food (for the next section) and beer (for tonight), hit up a southern barbecue restaurant for lunch and then drove to the home of his aunt, Missy. Her home was in an upscale mountain community and was both welcoming and eclectically furnished and decorated, as one might expect of an opera set designer who splits her time between here and New Mexico.Brian's sister had thru-hiked the previous year and stayed here too, so Missy knew what to expect and that's why we were shuttled into the showers and then quickly had the washing machine decontaminating our clothing.Our luck with the weather has continued too. We're doing a double nero, with an early finish today and a late start tomorrow, which combines almost perfectly with a short burst of rain coming through. I'm sure we'll be on the wrong end of this cycle eventually but for the time being... life is good!AT fact of the day: In the supermarket we found a brand of beer made by the Lazy Hiker Brewing Company, so of course we had to buy some. And now we've found that it's brewed in Franklin, an AT trail town we'll be able to visit in a few weeks. WIN!