Day 24: Deep Creek Hot Springs - Silverwood

Day: 01.05.2018 Miles hiked today: 22 miles Total Mileage: Mile 329.5 A new month started today. Can't believe we are on the trail for more than 3 weeks already! However, looking back at older pictures it feels like a different century! We hiked more than 300 miles already and still are doing well. So today is a big mileage day again and we started our hike at 5.50am. Well done us! After only doing a couple of steps I felt my blisters badly already which I popped and taped newly last night. Oh oh not good.... with a lot of pain I managed to hike 10 miles before 10 o'clock for the second time already. Great feeling that we have nearly done half of our day mileage goal already by then. However, I could barley walk anymore in my shoes and decided to hike on in my crocs for a while. So I did. And it was fine for a couple of miles. We breaked for lunch below a bridge because it was so windy. The weather changed and it looked like it is soon going to rain. A little more than 6 miles left to our camp site tonight, all along the beautiful silverwood lake. We changed to our rain gear (for the first time since we are in the trail) and soon later the sun would come back again! But it was still windy and cold and sometimes some small rain drops would reach us. My feet did a little better in the afternoon but my hip and back really started to hurt now. I guess I walked differently in the morning to avoid more pain in my feet and this affected my hip and back. Oh well not too long anymore. Just shortly before we arrived to our camp site we experienced some wonderful Trail Magic! This just enlighted my day after all that pain. Hot chocolate, fruits, biscuits and many more hiker desired food. That was just awesome! 2 hiking minutes later we arrived at our Camp Site where Rahels parents suprised us. Todays camp is actually a picnic area with possibilities to pitch tents. Even so it seems to be closed, one toilet was still open to be used. After pitching my tent I used this toilet and the sink (even hot water was available) to wash my hair. Ahh how nice they smell again. I feel much better and cleaner again even so I did not wash my body!!! It has been 4 days already without a shower! We did jump into the Deep creek hot water Springs and even so they may washed some dirt off us they were full of algae and not really clean. My hair looked horrible the next morning so I hided it all day below a hat (thanks god it was cold and hence was a hat wearing day anyways:) ). After all camp set up was done rahels parents drove us to the Sushi place we were dreaming off all day. We hoped for a nice warm Restaurant to re-heat our cold bodies and some yummie food. The food was delicious but the place was not heated and quite cold. I was actually freezing - but that may not say much as I am often cold - but the others were also rather cold (apart from rahels dad sitting there in shorts and a t-shirt!). While eating our food in the Restaurant we followed the news- snow in big bear lake - a lot of snow actually! God thanks we left that place a few days ago already, I definitely would not have been prepared for snow that early already!