Our trip to Four Pines to get to the Homeplace for all you can eat fried chicken and barbeque. The restaurant closes at 8, but we only had 16.7 miles to go and we left at 10. That's usually par for the course but the elevation profile these days usually can't be trusted since the treadway is a lot more relevant to our speed. We shook off the rain from the night before, which wouldn't be a problem since it was sunny during the day again. The first uphill went smoothly. Time went by quickly while we talked with Dean about relationships, video games, politics, and life after the trail. The second up, though, didn't go so smoothly. It's kind of a theme. The ridges were covered in boulders and huge slabs of rock bulging up through the ground that the trail needed to go below, above, around and through. These seemed to be the teeth that led to the upcoming Dragons Tooth. The trail after the tooth got worse. It was pretty close to a technical rock climb at points and at best a rock scramble. We finally made it to mile 702 (oh yeah, we passed 700 but the sign was apparently on the dragons tooth overlook sidetrack which we skipped) and walked the additional .4 miles down to Four Pines which was crawling with hikers. We found Leap Frog and Extra Mile, the first hikers on Dean's quest to catch his friends. We were starved and didn't have much time to chat since the shuttle heading to the restaurant was heading out shortly. We threw our stuff into one of the unoccupied barns which turned out to be a large chicken coop (later we decided to just set up our tents instead, there was chicken poop and giant sliders everywhere and no rain in sight.
We boarded the shuttle (i.e. back of a pickup truck) and headed to the homeplace. The three of us got all you can eat fried chicken and bbq pork. The sides of biscuits, green beans, cinammon apples, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, and pinto beans were also all you can eat. Somehow we also managed a bowl of blueberry cobbler at the end too. Like many things we've discovered, probably only thru hikers should be allowed to eat there.
*Dean and Tyler
We asked the resturant to call Joe, the owner of Four Pines. Joe is a big softie, but wants everyone to think that he's mean so people don't screw with him. Hikers can be jerks.
Back at the hostel, we hung out with Happy Hour, P Tang, Extra Mile, Leap Frog, and Monty. Tyler and Monty played a game of cribbage and Monty narrowly avoided a skunk. Vengeance for Mary and Bruce was achieved.
