Shakedown in Mistletoe

This blog is about practicing for our AT thru hike and part of that is practicing posting a blog from the trail. This post is done entirely with my phone so don’t expect anything too fancy.

As we work our way slowly north and prepare ourselves for the big hike, we booked a week in Mistletoe State Park in Georgia. The park is located north and a little west of Augusta, GA. Can’t help but think of golf near that city. We have a beautiful site but we may be challenged to get out. So, we may opt for backing up the road a ways. Anyway, this blog is not about RVing but about hiking.

After booking the campground, we discovered that the park had trails that included some back country camp sites. How perfect! We needed another shakedown hike and it promised to be much cooler than our last such hike. The day before we planned to do the overnight, we hiked the full loop of trails to check out the camping sites and pick the best one to reserve. That was an 11 mile hike without our packs which made us a little tired for the full pack hike of about 6 miles before setting up camp.

We arrived way too early at our site and had most of the afternoon to kill before cooking our dinner of Ramen noodles with tuna packets. Not too bad! After eating, we hung our food bag and climbed into the tent. We stayed awake listening to hiking podcasts until about 8:00 pm and then tried to sleep. I did a bit better than Amy. Temps got down into the low 30’s but we both managed to stay pretty warm. If we experience colder weather, we have more clothes we could put on.

We got up early and broke camp in order to get back to the RV as early as possible. It was Amy’s birthday, after all. She did sing “Happy Birthday to me” as we hiked back.

All and all a successful overnight. We were not discouraged and are starting to get excited for our thru hike to begin.