The combination of our walking with the weather had me thinking of Ingrid again and our travails through Georgia. I had just seen the day before that Melody, from The Feed Bag in Georgia, had signed the new guestbook as well. Through out the day as Todd and I sauntered along Ingrid hovered closely in my thoughts.
One of the things that kept bouncing around in my head was that I felt bad for pushing her so hard as we walked. With all our futzing around of breaking camp by probably one, grabbing coffee and rearranging things at that 7/11, and a long stop over at the post office we walked a total of about six miles. I would hear Ingrid's voice in my head mocking me and the angry driver of the Fung Wa Bus to Boston yelling "Ten mile!" This was my intended goal for us daily when we walked. Its very clear to me now that she was right all along. I was rushing through something that should have been savored, as she had wanted to.
So back to the morning of slowly crawling out of our packs. By the time we did, and were trying to strategize repacking the mess we'd made, we started to feel more rain. It turned out to be a false alarm but did get us moving a little bit.
Soon we arrived back at the 7/11 Todd had mentioned us stopping at the night before. More clouds were moving in, so Todd plopped down to dig out his rain fly. 
He offered to treat me to a coffee if I fetched him one too, so I set off to my task with his 15lb man-purse of change.
Sitting down on the curb at 7/11 messing with packs and drinking coffee was an exercise in slowing down for me. As I said I had unintentionally done my best to run Ingrid through Georgia in fear of running out of funds and here I was now trying to do a similar trip with the idea of not rushing this time. Todd was my anchor in this, and a prime reason as to why I thought he and I would balance each other out well.
We moved on about half a mile to the post office. Todd had made his decision on which of his dueling bivys to keep, as well as had some other dead weight to go home. Dropping down in front of the building we orchestrated things as people came and went eyeballing us in curiosity. One guy really took to us, who could really talk, and spent about an hour telling us of his travels, travels of people he knew, and asking about ours. I liked the little guy, and he gave me some good company while Todd did his thing.
Once we moved on past that it was probably about three or four. We had kept planning on cooking some oatmeal but kept waiting on a park to pop up for a place to do it. The sky kept changing its mind on us so we were often stopping and either shedding or donning rain gear. We also were waved to by a guy poking out his front door who yelled he'd look for us in an hour on 404, a road we've been planning to take. That got us excited about maybe catching a ride so the one park we did pass we passed up afraid he'd miss us if we were off the road.
By the end of the day we found a nice little camp spot and were famished. It took us a bit of finding "the perfect spot" but once we did we laid everything out and had our first camp cooked meal; rice with Hamburger Helper without the hamburger. We felt fat and good as Todd put it once we were done. Nestling away in our respective bivys I spent the rest of the night catching up on posts under a beautiful night sky.
Click here for Todd's perspective.
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