A couple miles from West Virginia (995 miles from GA)

Hi Everyone,

We got off trail for a really short break to chill at home and organize the boxes that we are mailing ourselves. It has been great to be in civilization, but we are ready to hit the trail again. Except that as always we are up late finishing/organizing everything.

Shenandoah was really awesome! At first we were skeptical, because the AT crosses the road every 2-3 miles, but the views were awesome and it was great to stop in at restaurants along the way for food.

Becky finally got grilled salmon, but because we had dinner at the resort, we decided to night hike to make up the mileage. As we were night hiking we ran across a bear!  Yeah! We think he was sleeping in a tree and when we came upon him he scrambled out. We went up the trail a bit more and Becky saw his huge butt as he was lumbering away. Unfortunately though we were on a ridge, so we couldn't get by him without being 10 feet away, because the bear didn't want to go further down the ridge. We don't think he could tell what we were because we were blinding him with our headlights. But we were supper tired, so we clanked our hiking polls together and he finally moved farther down the ridge so that we could get by. Then the next day we saw a bear in the daylight. He was adorable and really curious! However he was pretty far away so it was difficult to get a good picture of him, but we swear there is a bear in the picture below!

From now on, we will be carrying a camera cord, which we picked up from home.  So we'll be able to post more pictures. Here's a few.

Becky's trying to pet and play with a horse, but he just wants to eat her shorts probably because of the salt. Not the best bath option, but not too bad.

We've seen a lot of really cool toads on the trail. We even met one hiker who killed, gutted, cooked, and ate a frog. We have not gotten that hungry yet!

This was such an interesting sign. We think it's real, but maybe a joke. We're not sure because we never saw any lost cows. We don't know what we would do if we saw this cow walking up the trail.

We've seen a lot of great views.

And we've been camping in beautiful places in the woods

and even out of the woods. This is at the YMCA in Waynesboro. A family of geese were hanging out at our campsite too.

Becky got a quick shot of Amanda sleeping.

A cool salamander we saw. The orange ones are always really awesome to see.

We've been seeing deer the entire time especially in Shenandoah. Here's one walking along the AT too. It's hard to tell, but he had some amazingly big and fuzzy antlers. 

Because of the heat we've even been waking up earlier, so we've caught some great sunrises.

Well that's it for now.

Happy Trails,

Maple and Oak