deep gap shelter to clayton

i have a trail name! i am hereby known as ‘the ghost in the machine’. dan bequeathed me with the name after hearing about parts of my career and my complete and total lack of social media presence. he gave it to me last night, but i didn’t accept it till this morning.

we left the shelter in the rain. the entire area surrounding the shelter was under an inch of water. dry shoes and socks were soaked in seconds. :sad trombone:

nico and i hiked ahead. the trail was a soggy slippery mess. all energy was directed to not falling. sadly, nico took a fall and was covered in mud. thankfully only a little ways on we came to a stream so he could rinse off. on a rock next to the stream was what i thought was a bottle cap, but on closer inspection, i found it was a painted rock. the flip side said “trail gypsy”.

we got to dicks creek gap with about an hour to spare.dan and toby arrived a while later, but had time for a wet game of chess on dan’s phone beforr the shuttle arrived.

i can say definitively that clayton, the newest trail town (it just got the designation this year) is way nicer than hiawasee. spearheading that effort is outdoor 76, the local outfitter who was running the free shuttle.

we got to outdoor76, stashed our stuff, and headed off to eat. dan was a fan of chick-fil-a, so we went there, and i have to say it was pretty tasty. after chick-fil-a we were still hungry, so we went next door to huddle house which was a sort of extra sad waffle house. i ate three big waffles with corn syrup, which i learned in quebec is called telephone pole syrup. hah!

we got driven to the hotel by outdoor76 (they were so great) and i took a shower and did a video chat with magz who pointed out that we had chicken and waffles, just not at the same table.

we packed up some laundry and went to the laundromat, only to discover it was more expensive than outdoor76, so we walked there an threw our laundry in the machine. (again, outdoor76 ftw!)

we bought some food at outdoor76 and staahed it there before hitting ingle’s for the rest. i’ve taken to the pricy freeze dried meals for dinner, but oatmeal and healthy stuff for lunch.

by the time we got back from ingle’s, the laundry was done. we packed it all into our grocery store bags and headed across the street to get pizza at fortify. we looked like 4 homeless guys crossing the street. accidentally we went into the very nice restaurant next door to the pizza place and had sat down and drunk water before realizing fortify and fortifyπ are different venues. oops. we each ordered a pizza and ate the whole thing. nico and i also had some tasty beers.

after dinner we returned to the hotel, though dan and i stopped at mcdonalds for mcflurries on the way. we each did our own thing while a later “the fast and the furious” was on the tv. it was the one where they have to go to space.

nico needed headphones, so we headed out pretty late and walked the 3/4 mile to wal-mart and back. we were both also interested in what they had in the way of flip flops as potential camp shoes, but as usual, they didn’t even sell shoes my size.

we returned to the hotel and i tried to get caught up on writing, but at 22:30 i went to bed not having got to the present.