Day 54 – 22 miles – 733 total

Me and Stick were happy to be getting ready to walk again. We had to drive to our starting point and we left the car there with a note saying that we would be picking it up later. We didn’t have the carts or Domino. Just a small backpack. We had some dangerous roads ahead and my brother was going to help us by picking us up and taking us back to our car later in the evening.

We started walking. It was really cold and really windy. Didn’t matter though, we were happy to be out there. We started near a shipping port and it was fun to watch all of the activity going on as the containers were being moved off the ships and onto the trucks. We couldn’t watch too hard though because the road was pretty sketchy.

Sketchy roads were basically the story of the whole morning. It was a good thing that we didn’t have our carts. The scenery was beautiful though. We were walking through a wildlife preserve in marshlands. We crossed from Georgia into South Carolina.

3rd state and we were very happy. The road ahead took on the name “Alligator Alley”. We were on the lookout in hopes of a sighting. It wasn’t long before we saw a few babies. We weren’t satisfied though. We wanted to see mama.

Not much luck on alligator alley. We headed onto some other roads. Pretty country backroads. No shoulder though and traffic was moving fast. We pushed on.

We came up to a sign that marked a trail that we hadn’t planned for. We went over to look at the map and we decided to take the trail. It was a risk because we weren’t completely positive that the other end came out where we needed it to but we rolled the dice anyways because it was way safer.

Well it was awesome. It was definitely safer traffic wise but we started to see some huge alligators. We saw a few that were easily 8 to 10 feet. Most of them were around 4 to 5 feet and we saw a ton of baby gators running all over the place. It was like jurassic park. They never threatened us in any way. They either ignored us or swam away from us into the swamp.

We were coming up on the end of the trail and we were getting nervous because there didn’t look to be a clear way out. We plowed through some woods and avoided the water by finding one little animal trail and following it.

We found our way into a neighborhood. We looked on the map and it connected back to the highway that we needed to be on way up ahead. This worked out perfectly.

The neighborhood was really nice. Too nice. We stopped to clean ourselves up a bit. We tried to look like we fit in as much as possible but we still looked a little like wild animals in such a clean cut neighborhood. It wasn’t long before security was on our case.

The security car pulled up and the young female officer asked if we were residents there and when we told her that we weren’t she asked us how we got there… we kind of laughed a little bit because we knew the story was about to sound crazy.

…we just walked on a trail that doesn’t exist in googlemaps and passed a million alligators and luckily stumbled into someone’s backyard through the swamp lol

She wasn’t feeling good about that response. We then explained what we were up to and I laid it all out for her. She was cool once she knew that we really were just passing through. She let us continue on.

5 or 6 miles later we came to a good end point. A Wendy’s! We ate some food while we waited on Cameron to pick us up. Our feet were screaming at us but we felt great to be back to making miles. We got back to Cameron’s and started our decompress and preparation for tomorrow routine. Back to the full-time mission….