So far, my day off has proved to do my body good. I will be much better from now on to listen to my body and slow down a bit. Yesterday was a great day back on trail. We hiked about 9 miles before making it to an awesome lake, Lake Watuga. It was a beautiful day, so we ended up spending almost 5 hours relaxing there. We made dinner at the lake before hiking a final 2.5 miles to an awesome site on the other side of the lake. We had the perfect lakeside view. 

You can't tell in the dark picture, but I am roasting an awesome marshmallow to go with the awesome s'mores that my good friend Kelly gave me.
Have you ever heard a whippoorwill? Well, it has a cute little chirp, until you realize it likes to chirp at night...really loud. I was trying to sleep when one decided to do its chirpy business right in our camp. Earplugs went in!
A couple hours later, about a quarter to midnight, I had another visitor. A squirrel jumped right on my tent, and did a funny little dance, and then slid off my vestibule and ran away. It startled me awake, but turns out it may have been a good samaritan squirrel trying to tell me something. At that very moment, I heard Voltron say from his tent, "Lori, are you messing with the food bags?" As I told him no, I heard the noise he was hearing. Out come the earplugs, and I was definitely hearing some loud tree cracking noises.
There was a bear trying to steal our food bags which we had so carefully hung in a tree to keep him from stealing. How rude!
In the time that I debated on what to do, and had my  tent zipper partly open,  Voltron jumped out and started yelling. neither of us saw for sure, but the amount of noise it made running away, and all the grunting, I'm not so sure it wasn't more than one bear. Thanks to Voltron, our food was saved. The bear had broken the branch, a couple more tugs and it would have fallen down. The bear, or bears, never came back to our camp, but turns out after our camp, at least 2 other campsites were robbed. One guy had a bear eating spilled food right outside his tent, and two other guys lost their food bags which were also hung. I didn't sleep much the rest of the night!
So there you go. My first real bear adventure, but I am STILL yet to see a bear!