The Adventure Begins — Travel Day & The Last 48 Hours Before the Trail

3am. Alarm goes off. This is it.

After fifteen years of dreaming, two years of serious preparation, and more early mornings than I can count, I’m finally doing it. I’m heading to the Appalachian Trail.

The shuttle picks me up at 4:20am. The airport is quiet, barely anyone around, the Qantas staff haven’t even opened the check-in counter yet. I find a coffee shop — overpriced, airport standard, doesn’t matter — and I sit there with my thoughts and a very average flat white, thinking about what’s ahead. 2,200 miles. Five months. Five million steps. Georgia to Maine.

I am feeling all the feels.

Sydney → Melbourne → LA → Atlanta

The flights are smooth. Sydney to Melbourne is barely full — I grab a nap. Melbourne to LA I watch a couple of episodes of Jack Ryan, listen to some classical music, and drift in and out of sleep somewhere over the Pacific. LA to Atlanta is delayed half an hour but otherwise painless. I had an extra seat between me and the guy next to me, which felt like a small gift from the universe.

What strikes me most about the whole travel day is how seamless everything is. Security, immigration, customs, bag drop — all of it just flows. Maybe the trail gods are already on my side.

I land in Atlanta and check into my hotel in Sandy Springs — home for the next two nights. It’s Wednesday. The approach trail starts Friday. I’ve got one full day to get everything sorted.

First order of business? A large chicken salad from the grocery store down the road and a very long, very hot bath with Epsom salts. After nearly 30 hours of travel, my muscles need it. I fill that bath up three times. Zero regrets.

The Weather — A Sign of Things to Come

Thursday in Atlanta is stunning. Sunny skies, not a cloud in sight, high twenties — warm, beautiful, and honestly a little bit surreal for mid-April. Atlanta is experiencing record high temperatures for this time of year, and I am absolutely here for it.

I’ll be honest — starting the trail later in April is a deliberate choice. My biggest fear going into this hike isn’t the miles or the climbs or the blisters. It’s the cold. The AT in Georgia in early spring can be brutal — snow, ice, single-digit temperatures at elevation. By starting mid-April I’ve given the weather a chance to turn, and right now standing in Atlanta in warm sunshine, it feels like the right call. The trail is waiting and the conditions couldn’t be better.

The Last Day Before the Trail

Jet lag has me up at 3:30am — I don’t fight it, I just get up and work. Editing, website updates, pre-trail admin. By the time the rest of the world wakes up, I’ve already put in a solid few hours.

Then I hit the city.

Oh, and I should introduce you to someone who’ll be joining me for the entire journey. Meet LJ — Lego Jef — a miniature version of me handcrafted by my nephew Jasper before I left Australia. LJ has the hat, the jacket, the beard, and apparently better posture than me after 30 hours of flying. He’s already been on the plane, survived LAX, and is currently sitting on the hotel windowsill looking out at Atlanta like he owns the place. LJ will be popping up throughout the journey — keep an eye out for him.

“LJ settling in for the flight. Naturally, he chose the Lego Movie.”

REI is first and honestly it’s a highlight of the day. For my Australian readers, REI is the American equivalent of a Kathmandu or Paddy Pallin — a massive outdoor gear store, and this one does not disappoint. Dave the manager, Neil, Karen — the staff there are just brilliant. Helpful, knowledgeable, genuinely excited about what I’m about to do. I grab a gas canister, a reusable water bottle, a meat stick, and a few last minute hiking bits. There’s something about walking into a gear store the day before a thru-hike that just hits different.

Best Buy for my wall charger. Buffalo Wild Wings for lunch — although in full honesty, my body is still so out of whack from jet lag that I manage two wings and box the rest up to finish back at the hotel later. Then it’s off to Publix — a large American supermarket chain, think Woolworths but bigger — for my first three days of food resupply. And yes — I definitely overbought. Classic first-time thru-hiker mistake. I know this. I did it anyway.

By 1:30pm I am absolutely beat. I crash for two hours, then race to the post office to sort out my bounce box.

For those not familiar with thru-hiking — a bounce box is a care package you send ahead to yourself. You pack a box with items you’ll need further up the trail — extra supplies, gear you want later in the journey, personal items — and mail it to a post office or hostel ahead of your current location. As you hike, you leapfrog your box forward, picking it up when you arrive and sending it ahead again to the next stop. It’s a clever system that means you’re not carrying everything at once, and it keeps your pack weight manageable over five months on trail.

Box sorted, I head back to the hotel, eat the leftover Buffalo wings in bed, and feel deeply satisfied with the day.

Then I go to charge my Garmin.

The cable is broken.

My Garmin inReach Mini — my safety device, my live tracker, the thing my mum will be watching from Australia to know I’m okay — is almost out of battery. And tomorrow morning I’m getting picked up at 9am to head to Amicalola Falls.

There are no stores open before then.

I’m going to have to try the local grocery store in the morning and hope they stock a micro USB cable. It’s not ideal. It’s actually the first proper drama of the trail and I haven’t even started yet. But honestly? This is exactly what adventure looks like. Things don’t always go to plan. You adapt, you figure it out, and you keep moving.

That’s what the next five months are going to be. Problem solving, one step at a time.

Tomorrow I head to Amicalola Falls for Day Zero. The approach trail starts Friday. And then 2,200 miles of the most beautiful, brutal, and life-changing terrain in America stretches out in front of me.

Fifteen years in the making. It’s time.

If you want to follow along in real time, subscribe on YouTube at youtube.com/@JefGuerin and follow me on Instagram.com/jef.guerin Every step of this journey — the good days, the hard days, the unexpected moments — gets documented. Come along for the ride.

Let’s go.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​