Day 30

Day 30

Carvers gap to mountain harbour hostel

14.8 miles, mile 395.3

I am so thankful we got the Mountain Harbour Hostel for last night and tonight. There is a cat who loves Kevin, and is also 20 years old. We have met some awesome people here. They have a food truck at the hostel with burgers and they were able to make me one without a bun for me to eat. It was super delicious (I was also super hungry). We ate dinner with a whole bunch of people and Kermit kept us all laughing. He is 70 years old and this is his first thru hike and he is an amazing person. I got to see pictures of his grandkids and hear about his daughters and how he got his trail name (long story short the man loves Kermit). They will be flip flopping so I’m hoping we will run into them again when they’re going south and we are still heading north!

It absolutely poured all night and all day today. We made the choice to brave the rain and since we had the opportunity to slack pack all our gear would be dry and we could come back to a shower and some hot cocoa. Kevin and I absolutely booked it and hiked the 14.8 plus the 0.3 road walk to the hostel in exactly 5 hours. We kept a 3mph pace for 15 miles! It made it easier since we had no weight on our backs and a lot of motivation to finish. It was oh so cold up above treeline and windy and raining all day. It’s definitely a bummer because everyone says this section is absolutely beautiful. Maybe one day I’ll be back to day hike it. This was also the last bit of NC! The trail jumps back and forth over the NC/TN border and now we are heading more into TN and then onto Virginia. In the last couple miles we hear what we thought was a weird bird, but it was a tiny baby deer. I felt so bad for scaring it, this seems to be a trend with the grouse and now a deer. I hope it’s mom made her way back. We walked into the hostel dripping water and covered in mud. Everyone was astonished we were back so soon and I just owe it to the long legs and light pack. After we showered and I had my beautiful loner clothes outfit on I could put our laundry in. A lot of hostels have loner clothes because many thru hikers won’t carry an extra set of clothes for when they do laundry. At hotels I just wear my rain coat and wash my shorts in the shower, but loner clothes make it easy to wash everything at once. My puffy jacket somehow got soaked inside my pack liner but luckily the dryers had a no heat fluff option that works on the fragile material of the lightweight coat. We had Mexican food for dinner and will be hiking out of here after breakfast in the morning. I will miss the people we met here but know it will be a joyful day when we see them again as they are heading south to complete their hike.