pieonthetrail

Haha actually yes! The night before i started my hike we were all staying at the hiker hostel near springer mountain. He was a really nice guy and we bumped into him a few times before we heard he got arrested at trail days. Crazy!

HAHA! There's actually a lot of that, especially at the start. Generally speaking AT Hikers when they're not hiking like to rest, eat food and drink beer. Also there's a phenomenon called "trail magic", this is where people set up at a trail/road crossing and give food and drinks to Thru Hikers. They're often former Thru Hikers that want to give something back. It's just one of the examples of the great community on the trail

Yeah every 4-5 days the trail crosses some kind of road, we would hitchhike into town to re-supply on food. Sometimes we would stay in town for a night to shower and do laundry. If we needed to take a break we would take a "Zero" day (zero miles hiked), in which we rested, relaxed and usually drank beer and ate lots of food

I started alone, I flew in from Finland to Atlanta. The night before I started the trail I met two awesome guys and ended up hiking with them for the majority of the trail, we all finished together on the 15th of September. The community on the trail is so awesome, you meet people who will become friends for life

Good question. I'd been saving up for quite along time to do this and had budgeted around 6000 dollars for the trip. I left home not knowing if my job would still be available to me but luckily it is, i'll be going back to work in the next few weeks. Trail life can be really cheap if you want it to be, eating ramen noodles and pop tarts is cheap and you can dave a lot of money but not staying in towns and drinking lots of beer

Well i'd read the Bill Bryson book which inspired me as a child. In 2010 I did some hiking on the trail whilst working at a summer in New York state and got speaking to some thru hikers, after that experience I knew I had to do it. Also i wanted to do it just to see if i could, if i was capable of it. Plus I love travel and being outdoors, the experience didn't dissapoint