March 17, Day 1 in the Great Smoky Mountains, National Site #7

 Three amazing things:

1- The Great Smoky’s are much more enjoyable than I had imagined.  The only other time I traveled through them was when I was in the back seat of a van on incredibly windy roads with a 18-month old grandson who repeatedly vomited all over himself and his car seat.  When at last we arrived in that nasty town that passes as Gatlinburg, my daughter and I spent hours scrubbing and cleaning stale vomit.  Additionally, we had come for the gorgeous fall colors…us and at least a million other folk, and the road we traveled was bumper to bumper with us impatiently crawling and unable to find parking anywhere off the main drag.  Couple this memory with the fact that some of the most popular destinations in the Great Smokies today are not yet opened from the winter season, and well…my expectations were quite low.  I was, however, very pleasantly surprised and richly rewarded with today’s adventure.  The rain ceased, the clouds parted, and we ventured through Cades Cove on bicycle, circling 11 miles through the stellar dead-end valley where once lived and thrived entire communities of Appalachian families eking out a living from the soil and forests.  The park has preserved several churches, cabins, corn cribs, cantilever barns, grist mills, and blacksmith shops.  We could not have enjoyed ourselves more than we did today. 

2- I am amazed at myself for having ventured back into that nasty town that passes as Gatlinburg.  But  I had read so much about the chair lift ride above the city which takes one to a skywalk stretching from one mountain peak to the next with a clear view below through the Plexiglas walkway that I just had to check it out for myself.  Again with very low expectations, we paid the outrageously confiscatory fee to ride the chair lift up and down, then up and down again just for the slight satisfaction it afforded by deluding ourselves that we were actually getting our money’s worth.  The skywalk was okay, the chair lift kinda cool, and the views from above quite stunning.  But Gatlinburg has a way of making me slightly nauseated, so we hightailed it out of the St Patrick’s Day drunken crowd and out of one of the most touristy places I’ve ever had the misfortune to visit and made our way quickly back into the thick woods, endless rhododendron groves, and splendidly cold, clear cascading rivers of the Great Smokies.  I promised Aaron to never, ever, not ever set foot in Gatlinburg again. 

3- Every campground we visit is filled with a huge variety of differing trailers and other odd and unique structures for sleeping, some homemade and others imagined from pieces of equipment I hardly recognize or would consider worthy of sleeping in. The nice guy next to us is no exception.  He has his lovely wife and toy poodle sleeping in a tent he fashioned onto the bed of his pickup.  Off the tail of said pickup he has jimmy rigged another tent, and then he has set up a kitchen and dining area under a shade awning attached to the same pickup.  In any other setting, I’d think they are just homeless folk, but he fits in just right with all the other configurations of sleeping shelters we’ve seen.  His wife Melia tells me they’re quite comfortable in the bed of the truck and even have a TV set up in there.  I am all amazement.

Good deed:  Today was a stretch to find anybody to whom we might make a difference.  At length we settled on taking sea-salt chocolates over to the neighbors in their fantastical tent-truck set up and to chat them up and offer our friendship and anything they might need.  The chocolates as well as the chit chat seemed greatly appreciated.