This section of the trail featured some lovely lake and stream walking as well as shelters. SHELTERS!!! What a luxury and perfect timing as it starting raining after I let Heflin. As luck would have it things got more interesting socially as well. I had noticed that someone was geo-caching ahead of me. I had no idea what geo-caching was I just knew he was ahead of me. When I got to the Oakey Mt Shelter there he was with his tent pitched inside the shelter. This is a good way to get some extra warmth but not such a good way to share space. And not only did I show up but another hiker as well, this one a letterboxer. So now I was getting an earful from both of them about what geo-caching and letterboxing were and why one was superior to the other. Most of it was friendly but each one was pretty firm in his convictions.
For those of you who don't know (and I certainly didn't) geo-caching and letterboxing both hide small boxes in the wilderness. Geo-cachers find them by GPS, letterboxers by various verbal clues usually downloaded from a central website. Geo-cachers will find a box of various goodies of which they are alowed to take one in exchange for a return goody. Letterboxers do everything with hand made subber stamps. They put their personal stamp in the notebook inside the box that they find. They take the stamp from inside the box and stamp their personal notebook. And they even stamp each other's notebooks when they meet each other. The letterboxer I met actually ran the main website ad was something of a celebrity. I had seen his journal entries along the Florida trail as Green Tortuga but hadn't made the connection. He was hiking from Key West to Springer Mt, the southern end of the Appalachian Trail. We ended up hiking much of the Georgia Pinhoti together and he was a very fun and enterprising guy.
The northernmost section in Alabama is relatively new allowing the trail to stay off-road al the way to the Georgia line. I spent a wonderful evening near an overlook on Flagpole Mt looking into Georgia with a chance to reflect on where I was at this point in the journey. It was a beautiful evening and made me wish I hadn't messed up my camera back at the Choccolocco Shelter.