Day 9: No rain, no pain, no Maine

Hiked 7.3 miles, staying at Sapphire Inn in Franklin, NC.

I knew it was going to be a cold day when I woke up and there was a sheet of ice on my bear bag.  It poured rain last night but had turned into a steady drizzle by the time we got up.  Thank goodness we put the extra miles in yesterday.  It would have been a really rough day if we had hiked the originally planned 16 miles.

The thru hiker mantra in the title is very apropos for today.  Today not only was it below freezing but it rained... a lot.  When it wasn't raining it hailed.  We only had seven miles to go today and we got through them quickly, mostly because you couldn't stop or else you would get very cold.  On the flip side it was also very pretty in places.  The trees had large layers of ice on all of their branches and were hanging down over the trail.  This was also sometimes a bit dangerous as the strong gusts of wind we got at the top of mountains would shake loose  large icicles and break off ice laden branches on our heads.  We got down to Winding Stair Gap around noon.  I hiked a lot of today with ET (english tony) with Srocket and Why Not close behind.  ET kept going while the three of us hitched into Franklin for resupply.

We were expecting to have to wait a while to get a hitch into town.  I mean what person wants to pick up three frozen and soaked hikers covered in mud?  Well once again I was amazed by the kindness of people down here as we only had to wait until about the fifth car before a very nice lady picked us up and even gave us a mini tour of Franklin on the way in. 

Due to the weather we had decided to stay the night in Franklin to dry our stuff out a bit.  Well we weren't the only thru hikers to do so, the two main hiker motels down here are packed to the brim.  Srocket and I decided that we didn't want to go anywhere so we had dominos delivered to our room and chowed down. 
The afternoon was lazy.  I struggled with the slow computers to upload photos and spent time on the phone with nikon because my brand new camera died and I have to send it to them to get it fixed, wtf?!  We ran into POME (prisoner of mother england), a british hiker who we see every so often and invited him to dinner with us.