Love & Wildlife

Thank you friends and family, for all of your love! We arrived in Gatlinburg yesterday but had to wait until this morning for the post office to open so that we could get our packages. We went up to the counter, told the clerk our name, and he came back with a stack of about 7 packages containing lots of love and goodies! Thank you!!! Unfortunately we can't take everything with us back on the trail, so we shared a lot of it with our new hiker friends. Everyone was so grateful to share in such wonderful treats!

On another note, we've seen lots of cool wildlife while on the trail....still, no bears.....but LOTS of birds. TO name a few: Ruffed grouse, wild turkeys, belted kingfishers, downy woodpeckers, LOTS of pileated woodpeckers, chimney swifts, eastern phoebes, purple martins, american robins, white-breasted nuthatches, pine warblers, yellow-rumped warblers, northern bluebirds, baltimore orioles, and TONS of Dark-eyed Juncos. In addition to birds, we've also seen eastern cottontails, red squirrels, gray squirrels, chipmunks, newts, salamanders, and of course.....mice!

We took a zero day today so that we would have time to go to the post office, grocery store, and to get a little taste of Gatlinburg. It's very much like International Drive in Orlando, except with mountains in the background and wedding chapels all around. Tomorrow morning we head back on the trail and start doing around 20 miles a day. We should reach Hot Springs on the 24th, in time for the hiker festival there, and will hopefully have a chance to soak our tired bodies in the hot springs.