Today we drove to North Carolina and began to put our logistics into place to begin our second section hike from the NC/GA line to Fontana Dam, NC. First we drove to Franklin and checked out the Budget Inn and the Sapphire Inn. The Budget Inn was full and we liked the Sapphire Inn better, so we made reservations for Sunday night and dropped off a resupply box. Then we drove to Nantahala Outdoor Center in Wesser and made reservations for a two-person room in Basecamp for Wednesday night. We parked the car at NOC and checked and rechecked to make sure we had everything we needed for our first three days on the trail. It’s a scary feeling to leave our car realizing that if we didn’t take it with us now we would not have it tomorrow when we started out on our hike and would not see our car for 6 days.
We are using the same wonderful shuttle drivers out of Hiawassee that we used in September in Georgia. Joyce and Sally are two retired ladies from Florida who moved to GA and have a beautiful home near the Blue Ridge Gap. We have learned to find shuttle drivers who live close to your point of need in order to keep the cost down. Joyce and Sally are very reasonable. Sally met us at NOC and took us back down to
Hiawassee, GA to spend the night at the wonderful Holiday Inn Express (King
size bed with Jacuzzi and free HOT breakfast for $80 plus $10.16 tax). The
Holiday Inn is conveniently located next door to the wonderful Daniels
Steakhouse where they have all you can eat buffets, which we took advantage of for
our evening meal.
We were excited to get our adventure underway and arose the next morning with the sun, went to breakfast downstairs and then relaxed to look at our Thru-Hiker’s Companion once more while waiting on our shuttle. The Companion was nowhere to be found – I had left it in the car! OMG! How could we hike for 6 days without our Companion? We depend on it to plan our stops at shelters or campsites and also to know where water is along the trail. Okay, what are we going to do now? Making a mad dash downstairs to the public computer, I found that someone else was using it. So back upstairs to wait. Time was running out, but finally we got to the computer and quickly found a list of trail features with amenities on Summitpost.org. Thank goodness I remembered seeing it before and knew it was there. It doesn’t have a description of each site like the Companion does, but it will do for now. We printed it out just in time before Joyce arrived to drive us to the trail. RELAX…..! We are ready to go.
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