The entire population of our last night’s campsite (that would be Roger Sanderson and the two of us) was on the trail by 7:30am. We had a very short climb to the top of Bluff Mountain, and then the rest of the eleven miles to Hot Springs was mostly downhill. Now this was the way to start the day!

X set a very quick pace, with only an occasional break for a nature study (the two most prominent being a small snake which stretched across the entire width of the AT, and a turtle heading in our same general direction). By the third hour we were both feeling the near record heat, and frequent water breaks didn’t seem to help much.

On arriving in Hot Springs, we checked in at Elmer’s Sunnybank Inn, a place we’ve wanted to experience for years. Elmer and N talked about days of riots and tear gas at Duke University in the spring semester of 1969 when they were both on campus, but Elmer’s lack of interest in Duke basketball cut the conversation shorter than it might have been otherwise, and allowed X to shower (with at least three rounds of shampoo) and get back across the street to the Smoky Mountain Diner before she fainted from hunger.

After this late lunch, we moved on to the laundromat, the bank, and the first of several trips to Bluff Mountain Outfitters, where X’s thoughtful brother Bob had left us a gift certificate. These were all popular haunts with the AT hiking community and we ran into many of the folks we’d met between here and Springer Mountain. It was a pleasant afternoon and we look forward to another full day in town tomorrow. We bumped into our new friend Roger at the restaurant tonight, so we ended the day with the same company we’d started with this morning. And all of us concluded we like days in town…