Day14

Two weeks in, and I have already found my favorite and least favorite parts of the trail. Favorite: going into towns that consist of a gas station and a motorcycle only bar and emptying the land of all their Cup of Noodles.
Least Favorite: Walking
Favorite: Campfires and beautiful views.
Least Favorite: Pissing blood.

My two companions, Isaac and Jake, are good friends, helping me get through the trail during the hard times. We spend the days talking about best movies, actors, books, models, food we dont have, all the time meanwhile arguing about how much miles we should walk that day. We are picking up the pace, hitting overr 20 miles for the past 4 days, which I believe is attributed to us wanting to finish as quickly as possible.

Nature wise, I have seen much, but there are still some things I am looking out for. The AT is often called the "green tunnel" because it literally is a narrow trail cloaked in bushes and trees. I have seen several small snakes (no rattlesnakes), a few wild turkeys (one that attacked us for coming to close to its nest), 12 newts, 17,000 insects, 8 wild boar (very cool, they saw us and stampeded away into the fog one morning), and about a million mice. The mice are the worst part, because you can hear them crawling all over everybody in the shelter, and going through bags looking for food. The other night, Jake left a bit of his tent open, and awoke to a mouse crawling all over his face. Isaac was laughing at Jakes misfortune until later that morning he found a family of mice that had made a home in his pack. I am waiting for my bear encounter. hiker we met said that earlier in the week he was alone at a shelter when a bear came into the campsite and began pacing back in forth. Scared, the hiker said that he threw a large rock at the bear (sounds like a very stupid idea). Afterward, the bear did run off which makes me slightly more believe when he said that he once had a "Nolan Ryan fastball" back in the day.

I will write again in a few days to let you know how the second leg of my journey went. Please forgive any misspellings, 40 other hikers are waiting to get on this one computer in Tennessee.