Day 64 | Appalachian Trail Thru Hike 2024 | SOBO?

Good morning, it's day 64. They say every journey begins with a single step, but I believe ours began over two years ago when we decided to attempt a through hike of the Appalachian Trail. Through years of preparation and training, we prepared ourselves for an adventure of a lifetime. This is our journey to Katahtin. We're having some waffles, coffee, and getting ready for a snack pack at eight o'clock. Yummers, look at that. It's pretty good, not gonna lie. This will be some good fuel, I hope. I put lots of butter on mine. Foggy morning. It is. I love the fog. All right, gearing up. Little bears put on their shoes. And Miss Renee, our shuttle driver, will bring us about 20 miles north, and then we will walk back here southbound. And it's about a 58 minute car ride there. Nice shuttle to trail from Miss Renee. Thank you. You are so welcome. I really enjoyed it. It'll be our first time going southbound, so that will be fun. Probably won't know the difference, but either way. All right, so we're off. We got about 20.6 miles back to Burke's Garden Hostel, and we're headed southbound today. Nice blue skies. Beautiful open view, huh? Yeah. Oh, the visitor has firewood. There's a camp right here. Oh, that is scary. It's so windy. Shouldn't be going up a mountain. Can you imagine if there was a house down there? I can. It would just be so beautiful. I can't. It's only lost it. There he is. Wow, look how camouflaged you are. Good job, little buddy. Okay, carry on. Enjoy your day, Loto. Enjoy your day. Quick stop for some water. We did that tandem like a team. Like a NASCAR pit crew. Just talking about how efficient we were with our water. Grabbing our water and filtering it and back down the trail. Look at this amazing camp spot. Wow. Fancy. A picnic table even. Lots of spaces for tents. Memorial Creek. Wow, it's so cool. Wow. Look at the baby snake. Hey, little guy. Are you sure I'm seeing lots of snakes in the past two days? Yeah, you're really cute. That was really cute. Hi, little guy. That's like a white tail. Or that's a leaf. Yeah, I think it was a leaf. Birds are singing. Well, perfect. We found our lunch spot. This is absolutely the perfect spot for us today. Wow, that's flowing really quite rapidly. I know. Lovely. It's perfectly splendid. How is it? Look at the butterfly. For like a millisecond, I think. All right, ready for lunch? Yeah. Just keeps going. This is a great spot, isn't it? We're eating lunch right now and she's putting fig jelly on her Spam. It's so good. So it's fig preserves on Spam. Oh, it's delicious. But we packed out a soda, so that's good. That's the Spam and Coca-Cola combination I recommend. With fig preserves. Can I try a little bite? Just try a tiny bit and see if you like it. Okay, now take a bite. That was a lot. Just take a bite. It's so good. I'm telling you, it's delicious. So the texture is weird. It's good though, isn't it? No. No, that's really not good. I am so happy right now. This might be my new lunch for a while. Spam, fig preserves, and Cheetos. Oh yeah. I have sunk to a new low. I have got, okay, so I got the Coca-Cola. I got Spam, but I got two of them because they're really easy to eat. So yeah, I've got another one. And then I got these chewy Nature Valley. I did not mean to say chewy. Nature Valley protein bar. It's really good. I like it. So yeah. Advance, Tyler. You should try it. It's really good. Um, yeah. There's chicken on lunch break. There's gorgeous river view. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so yeah, that's kind of it. Bye. Say bye. Bye. Bye. I'm eating. I'm so happy. This is so good. That's a lot of water coming down, huh? Oh boy. Whoa. Look, I just found this nest nestled in the tree. I can't really see anything though because there's leaves on top of it. Nice little find. Yeah. Yeah, I get stiff if I do. Look at just this section. It's just so different than what we've been in all day today. Yeah. You look back at all the big boulders and it's pretty much just rocky this whole way. I think it's about five miles of just big rocks, not the smaller rocks that hurt your feet. This is mostly just the big boulder hopping that we're getting to do. But also so much of this section is so overgrown. It is quite uncomfortable. Yeah, but it's beautiful. I mean it's very green. Very like just tropical with all the ferns. And we're happy that it's cooled down quite a bit as well because there for a while it was, I think it was like 72 last time I looked and the humidity was just really high so we were sweating buckets. It's crazy to think that 70 can be so hot but it sure can. But now it's cooling down a bit and I think it's about quarter after four and I don't know what the degrees, the temperature happens to be right now but there's a nice breeze and we're under lots of shade which is just super nice. We have I think about five miles left to our day for a 20.6 mile day. We'll see you probably back at the shelter, I mean not shelter, the hostel. Unless we happen to see something really cool which chances are we probably will. Well hey this is a special shout out to Anthony which happens to be my best friend Saffron's cousin. Anthony I've heard that you're moving here to Virginia which is of course where we are and where we'll be for a little while because as you know probably we are through hiking the Appalachian Trail and Virginia is about 550 miles of the total span of 2,197.4 miles. So we'll be here for a bit and I just want to welcome you to the United States. Congratulations, I'm so excited for you to be able to come here and to play soccer and to follow your dreams and be a wonderful wonderful part of our country. So welcome, I can't wait to meet you. I'm sure we will all get together at some point with Saffron and yeah just wanted to say hi and little bear wanted to say hi as well. Welcome. So we will be in touch soon to hopefully properly welcome you into the U.S. We'll see you soon. Oh and I can't speak of South Africa without speaking of two of my favorite people, Berna and Carmen. I think about you guys so often and I cannot wait to come back to South Africa for a visit. I love you guys and I just can't wait to visit again and spend some time with you. And Carmen, just in case you were wondering, I have been practicing and working hard on my cleaning skills so I may be available for hire whenever I come for my next visit should you need any help up keeping your home. And to those who are wondering what the heck I'm talking about, Carmen will know. Oh good to talk to you guys even though it's through YouTube but thank you for following our journey and I look forward to seeing you again one day hopefully soon. Oh look at this awesome trail magic because this is a dry area and this is four gallons of water from the shuttler Donnie Duck. And Donnie, I remember you and I speaking on YouTube and you following us a little bit so thank you so much for that trail magic. That was wonderful. It's definitely a dry section and it's quite hot and humid today so thank you, thank you, thank you. Hey over there. So these rocks aren't nearly as bad as what people were saying as it slowing us down just a tad bit but Huckleberry was right in the sense that they're not bad. It slows you down a little from your normal speed but otherwise it's all right. What, oh the overgrown? Yeah that's no fun. Not my favorite. We've dealt with a lot of overgrown stuff today, huh? I mean here's what it really is. You just kind of have to, you know, you're watching your footing. There's rocks sticking up everywhere and either they're big enough boulders just to kind of boulder hop through or then step on the softer soiled floor and it's, I said soiled floor. Y'all know what I mean. The softer forest floor or just boulder hop kind of like this too. How overgrown that is though. So glad we get a shower tonight. Stuff makes you itchy. All right 20.6 miles. You ready to have dinner? You think we have some hiker hunger setting in? I think it's real. All right so we just had dinner and it was delicious. We finished a 20.6 mile day from, oh hold on, from Walker Gap to Brushy Mountain Outpost for 20.6 miles. Yeah. Hey Shawn, what was your highlight for today? Overall today, although it was really hard and I would not recommend this section for like day hikers, I think overall today, today was a really nice weather. It did get to up to 73 which was really hot but overall today, I think today was just like a good day for me. My highlight was, excuse me, our lunch. Our lunch by Laurel Creek. Yeah by Laurel Creek. That was really pretty. It was really nice. Beautiful day. It was just nice to sit there and kind of relax. So that was my highlight. There's a lot of waterfalls too. Yeah a little big, like a lot of little ones but it was really nice. What about your character folder? I would say probably those last, what was it, 2.3 miles that, I feel like that just took forever. Yeah. Honestly, I was just ready to be done. It was a long day today. Yeah, I mean. Yeah. I'm gonna agree with you. I was just ready to be done. It felt like the longest. I just wanted to sleep. Two, three miles or so ever but I'm glad we did it. Yeah. I'm glad that we, we feel good now. Now that we've had showers, we've eaten a lot. I think I, I don't even know how many calories I just consumed and I don't know how many you just consumed either but it was, it was a massive amount. It was a good amount. Yes and we feel better now and so the hostel is actually full tonight. There's not anybody down here in the little kitchen, laundry area. Look at those cool chairs. Those are just so neat, aren't they? Yeah. Little Bear loves these chairs. They're, it's like a swing. Yeah. It's nice. Show how you can like lean back. Yeah. This is really cool. Watch this. So you go like this. Okay. Super comfortable, huh? Yeah. Yeah. I like it here. Um so yeah, the hostel's full. There's I think 10 of us upstairs where last night there was just Little Bear and I and Story. There's 10 of us upstairs but it's a little after nine o'clock. Yeah. Maybe and so I think we're going to um get ready for bed and get the sack tonight and get ready for tomorrow. Tomorrow we will have to be shuttled to where we started today because remember we went Sobo. So we'll be shuttled about an hour again to Brushy Mountain Outpost and then head northbound from there. Yeah because we're going northbound now. Yeah and then we're going northbound again. And actually I kind of got to wait a few minutes because my laundry is still in the washer and we definitely needed to do the laundry after today. Yeah. Today was a hot today. Yeah. Yeah. Very very hot and kind of gross so that's what we're going to do. We're going to wait a few more minutes for our laundry and then we will get off to bed. Yeah. Super proud of you. Great job today. Here's a picture of Ellie. Oh yeah. Love and light to you all and either we'll put a I will like take a picture. Yeah take a picture or just record really quickly because Ellie's upstairs on her bed right now. Yeah she's waiting for me to come back. Bye. Bye.