It’s getting real #ATCLASSOF2025

This morning we woke up at 3:40 for a 6 AM flight. Travel day was very smooth. Ron from Ron’s shuttles picked us up in his Toyota forerunner that has 609,000 miles on it, and it is the coolest vehicle I’ve ever been in. It was filled with all AT things. Ron gave us some trail magic. He gave us a horn for the bears. And he also gave us a tootsie pop. Ron was awesome and the ride took about two hours. Uneventfully we made it to the Visitor Center at Amicalola Falls, where we checked in and got our AT tags and got our famous picture at the arch. This made it feel very real and it was emotional. The hike up to the Lodge through the Falls was absolutely stunning. Just over one mile and 850 ish elevation gain. We ate dinner at the lodge (10/10 buffet), we of course ate our hearts out but what’s new. Before dinner we spent some time rearranging our packs and getting rid of things to make our packs lighter. We both had a hiking towel and decided to donate one to the hiker box and cut one of ours in half and each get half. I had this jar of PB that made me realize I need the squeeze PB not a plastic jar.😂 I had packed a moisturizer for my face and I was like nope bye and realized my face back at home would get dry really only after removing makeup, and that won’t be an issue here!! We also are now starting to really take advantage of being a team, we need one thing of floss, contact solution, Swiss Army knife, etc. We are already learning!! We also spent sometime before dinner getting down the bear bag hanging “PCT” style.. well we suck at knots.😂 We were finagling outside the lodge with the bear bag and a tree, people must have been like what are they up to? We ended up finding a YouTube that did a great job at showing us how to tie this certain type of knot, my dad got it then I did. The sunset at dinner was out of a movie. The mountain range and sunset were stunning. One more sleep and it’s NOBO time!!