In the morning Michael kindly lent me his USB cable so I was able to charge my hearing aids and be able to hear for most of the day.
Hiking was good, the weather warm, sunny and pleasant, a little too hot at times but the views were beautiful.
Breakfast every day consists of granola with coconut milk powdered of course and a cup of instant coffee. I left the campsite at 9:00, which is really too late. I’ve got to try to get out earlier.
It was a long day. I was planning to go to Blood Mountain shelter but a few miles before that I noticed on the Far Out app that the area of Blood Mountain shelter is restricted to people who have a bear can (an indestructible plastic barrel that bears can’t break or get into) and so there was no way I could camp there. Blood Mountain shelter was already something like 14 or 16 miles, so my choices were Camp before there or continue on past there. Since the Mountain Crossing store was a couple of miles after blood mountain and it was downhill, I decided to head onward in the hopes that I could purchase a USB cable there or perhaps a battery that could charge my hearing aids properly. I got there around 5:00 p.m. and saw someone I had seen at the previous shelter although at the time I didn’t know his name. He was sitting outside eating a pizza. I went inside and started asking about USB cables when they mentioned that it was last call for pizza. So I ordered a cheese pizza. I tested the USB cable, it seemed to work, so I waited outside until the pizza arrived. By now the guy I’d met the day before had already disappeared. The pizza came about 10 minutes later and the guy who brought it asked if I was staying at the hostel. What hostel I said? There was a hostel in the basement of the building he said there were already five people there. It was $40 a night. Not wanting to head on to a campsite and have to look for a bear hang, since there wasn’t a shelter nearby only a campsite, I figured what the heck let’s stay in a hostel. I forked over my $40 after eating the pizza. Oh by the way the pizza was delicious and the first major amount of cheese I’ve eaten in 5 years. I couldn’t really finish it so I think I had five of the eight slices. I went into the hostel where I met Rumpeltick, a guy probably in his 50s with a very long beard and no hair on top (this was the pizza man from earlier), Chrissy a woman in her twenties who I believe is a nurse, Lightning (I don’t know her real name, she was nicknamed by Chrissy because she was so fast) – Lightning is probably about 22 and she and Chrissy were hiking but privately Lightning told me that she was frustrated with Chrissy because Chrissy was taking far too long and going far too slow, then there was John who slept in the bunk under me, Chase, a 22 year old environmental studies graduate who says he has no work prospects so why not hike the AT, and another woman whose name I don’t recall. I I sat at the dining room table with Chrissy and Lightning, finished my pizza and chatted with them. They were trying to figure out whether to take a zero day and go into a town because Chrissy had 17 days worth of Marriott Hotel credits and wanted to stay at a Marriott hotel for the day. They were planning to catch a ride to a part of the trail further ahead later.
We all headed to bed around 8:00 p.m., hiker midnight after all, but I had a terrible time getting to sleep. I was on a top bunk and the ceiling was barely two feet above me and there were all these ducts above me and because it was a basement I guess they had electric heaters running on the floor and all that heat rose up to the ceiling so it was quite hot. I was lying there with just my shirt and undies on not in the sleeping bag and feeling quite sweaty. Finally at about 10:00 p.m. I got up, ruffled through my backpack trying to find my back ache pills which tend to knock me out and eventually found them. I took one and went back to bed. Also I couldn’t find my face mask, and there was a red exit light shining in my eyes. So I covered my face with the arm of my fleece. Finally I fell asleep probably around 11:00.