A Week on the Appalachian Trail
Sunday, June 10th, 2007
We made it!
We got to the Laurel Fork Lodge around 8 p.m. after a long day of travel from Pinehurst to Raleigh to Boone and finally through Hampton, TN, to the lodge. It’s such a cool place.
We arrived to find no one home here and looked around in the small rustic cabins and the hiker bunkroom. There are several cabins for rent or you can sleep in the bunkhouse for $6 a night. When the family running the lodge returned to check us in, we opted for a cabin to ease ourselves into roughing it.
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| our cabin |
The first thing I noticed is the silence up here. It’s deafening yet absolutely wonderful. All you can hear outside is the creek. It’s nice after a weekend of wedding activities. But it is a little creepy. As I started writing this blog from the common room in the lodge, we heard a loud crash outside by the trash can. I wasn’t sure if it was the manager emptying the trash or an animal. We slammed the door shut, and after a few minutes I gingerly peeked outside to find the trash can’s contents scattered on the ground. I hope it was only a raccoon.
The second thing I noticed is that there is no cell phone service. That means no wireless internet service! A fancy laptop with a sprint card means nothing up here. So here I am on the lodge’s laptop on dial-up. It’s been a while since I had to wait so long for a page to load. Tomorrow morning we’ll head down to Hampton to the internet cafe, and hopefully I can send some photos of the lodge before we start our hike.
We also have to arrange a shuttle to get to our starting point about 30 miles away. I hope we won’t have any problems on such short notice. We originally thought we’d drive Jack’s car to the start and leave ours at the end. But since Jack couldn’t make it, we now need a ride. If all goes well we should be hiking tomrrow afternoon. If not we have time to wait until Tuesday morning.
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