An End on the Day

Twenty-five years ago today, about now, Jane and I were at Pinehurst Conservation Grounds, near Paris. We had been married for a couple of hours. We were living in a trailer at the end of my parents' yard. We had our wedding bands, and a 1973 Pontiac that cost us $200.00 and some sheet metal and pop rivets. This was as much honeymoon as we got; I was back at work the next day.

Jane was twenty, I was twenty-one.

If I look back closely over those twenty-five years, they contain too much detail to hold in mind at once, too many significant circumstances to appreciate, too much joy and striving and love, setbacks struggle and quiet triumph to name, catalogue or savour in one setting at a keyboard. This is, perhaps, why the years seem to rush past as we grow older: we lose sight of everything that makes up those years because there is too much on which to reflect. We simply stop trying to remember it all, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of our lives.

What a long way we have come, Jane and I, and what a long time it took to get here!

Three days after we were married, I felt as if we had always been married , with a sense of acceptance and the knowledge that the universe was unfolding as it was supposed to. Life is still ultimately happy, fractal, organized chaos with new wonders revealed each day - we're not done yet.

Technical details

1964 Imperials are over-built. They are more massively constructed under the dash, with heavier supports and extra brackets, all of which get in the way when you are trying to unbolt stuff. Add doors that have frozen shut from rust and age, other hulks cheek to jowl around it and specify that the floor be either rotted away or covered in ragged, rusty parts, or any combination thereof, and you will easily understand why it took me over two hours to get the vacuum booster for the power brakes out of the donor car. Getting in and out was an interesting act of contortion; I don't think the driver's door opened any more than 6 inches at the bottom. In the course of this job, I did the backwards-twist, sit and drag/ whole process reversal thing about seven times. I got soaked in the process, but as the other kind of weather available was hot sun, that took care of itself.
My learning curve contributed to slowing things down; this booster removal marks the first time I have ever done one.
Taking the busted one out and putting the donor booster in our car didn't take much more than 45 minutes - and resulted in some improvement, for a given value of some. I temporarily fixed a vacuum leak with some JuicyFruit gum, and will do it properly before we leave tomorrow. The problem is, as ever, that parts for old cars can be ordered in if you have a day or two or a week to wait in one spot for them. Which I will do when I get home.

Be Prepared

My Guide leader always told me to do my best, help other people and be prepared. Specifically, when we left on this trip we were at least mentally prepared for the possibility (inevitability?) of breakdown.

Our object lesson for the day starts when we decided, as we normally do, to wander our way home on quiet back roads rather than busy interstates. This may well have saved our lives, as our power brakes failed as we were pulling over to the side of the almost deserted road to change drivers.

For the last couple of hours, we have had a fascinating time. First we found a man(Doug?) that does wheel alignments in the town of Canisteo NY, chosen by Rob who spotted a couple of antique cars in his yard – thank goodness for his old car radar. His (Doug's) original suggestion? – “go and see “Wild Bill” who lives just north on the 36, he has an old Chrysler in his front yard and may have the part you need.” After consulting with a few people to find out what Wild Bill's actual name was, he was given a better suggestion by a buddy. A man named John in a smaller town a few miles down the road has “all kinds” of old cars. He might be able to help.

Hence the opening picture. We followed John from his shop to his farm and personal workshop. He was in his 1921 Dodge pictured here. She broke down on the way there, and the spotter he brought with him had to tow him home. Rob and John were out in the yard for a while, and have found the parts Rob will need, and Rob is now in the process of pulling something off an even older car than ours.

Since I started this story, I have had to move to a spot in a shed to get out of the rain and hail (which is deafening on the tin roof of this thing), and Rob is still out in the field/yard, trying to convince a 1964 Chrysler to give up it's parts.

The temperature today promised to be in the high nineties, and I know you will pleased to hear that New York weather keeps its promises. The hail storm was a welcome relief (easy to say from my vantage point under the roof of the shed) and has cooled the air way down to the low nineties.

Will he be home today, under the circumstances? Well, your guess is as good as mine at the moment. We prepared. We left a few days at the beginning and a few days at the end for just this sort of emergency – it's all just part of the adventure.

Photos that go with the last post

You may remember this from Close Encounters... It is the actual filming model. Now look closely at the picture on the right. No wonder they found earth, with good old R2 to lead them! We also saw a VW bus, and some little model planes in on the model. Below is the best picture we could get of the Enterprise. Unfortunately they don't let you go inside...

Heading Home

We found yet one more Smithsonian museum to visit on the way out of town; this one has the SR-71 Blackbird, the Concorde and the Space Shuttle Enterprise in it. And a billion other bits of aviation history. One such is the Enola Gay, now back in one piece after 40 years. One of two extant, it dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. (The other B-29 still existing - but not at this museum - is Bock's Car, which dropped the bomb on Nagasaki. Strange to think that of an entire production run, only these two were deemed worth keeping. More people died under their wings than any other two planes in history.)
I won't go into further detail of this place, except to mention the experimental counter-rotating helicopter built by a 19-year-old and static-tested in his father's driveway: Tom Swift is true to life after all.
Then we drove, in air made solid by the sun. It was about 98 F, but somehow far hotter than yesterday. I have not been in weather like that for longer than I can remember. We were later than expected leaving the museum - big surprise - and wanted to stay off the interstates, which is how we ended up in Gettysburg, with no time to see anything but cannons and markers against the skyline. On the way through the town, Jane spotted the same ice cream store where she had ice cream when she was 11. Then more driving to Williamsport, where we are staying at the historic Genetti hotel, which deserves its descriptive if the pictures of famous guests on the walls of the lobby are anything to go by. It looks (in the dark - it was a long drive) like it dates from the Twenties.
Pizza and sleep - we'll be home tomorrow.

We're old hands at getting to the Smithsonian now, beetling into the Natural History Museum about 1030, ducking in from a strong sun bent on driving the temperature outside up to 91 F or so. We have the idea that we will see only the galleries and exhibits that interest us, and we know what they are and where, and time will be conserved for the National Art Gallery. This time it's 1500 before we are standing on the steps - and we stuck to the plan, as far as seeing just what interested us most: displays on minerals and gems, dinosaurs, the ice age, early mammals, meteorites and the section on plare tectonics, earthquakes and volcanoes that snuck in when we weren't looking.
There are two kinds of children in the museum; those wide-eyed and in the process of having their understanding of the universe expanded by an order of magnitude and those who are tired of all that right now and need to get outside to play. As the day goes on, the ratio of the former to the latter goes into a steep decline. We headed down the street at a very slow stroll in the heat to the National Art gallery, and found that this one closed at 1700. We expected that here too we would be forced out at closing.
It has a dome-and-pillared rotunda that owes everything to the Romans, and outclasses them with ease at the same time. I have one photo that in no way conveys the majesty of the place. The galleries are endless, and as comprehensive in covering Renaissance and Dutch masters and Impressionists as anything I have seen in my limited experience. Sorry, that is badly put. This IS my limited experience at actually seeing these art genres; what I meant is that artworks and artists I have only read about are here, in front of my eyes. This is actually a problem; there are so many brilliant works that my mind eventually overloaded, and at 1630 we were outside, ambling through a giant folk festival on the Mall. What the National Art Gallery needs is a month or more where I spend each day in one or two galleries, no more, in hours of quiet contemplation. But I can definitely say that should they run out of space to store any of the Monets, I've got some wall space at home that, you know, could use a bit of brightening up, and I'd be happy to return them anytime after I'm dead.
Jane needed to rest, and while she did, I loped over the horizon to the Washington Monument (see enclosed photo, looking like every other photo of this massive obelisk) and the World War II Memorial, and the Vietnam Memorial. The last is too hard to take; I took no photos of either.
Then back to the hotel and the reality of hotel guest laundry rooms; nothing worth further mention.

Day Well Spent

The freeway that never sleeps howls below the hotel, matched only by the air-conditioner that won't let you sleep - but we slept anyway, dead tired and afraid of not getting an early start in the morning. Then it turned out that getting to downtown Washington is utterly painless: the hotel takes you to the Metro, the Metro takes you to the Mall, the stop is labelled Smithsonian, and there you are.
Not being entirely too bright, I didn't take a picture of the Smithsonian Castle, but google it, and triple the effect of whatever photo you might find, as the reality of it is quite overwhelming. After viewing the displays there, we went down the street to the National Air and Space Museum, where we assumed that between 1030 and 1600 we could see everything that would interest us. Wrong. It all interested us; the entire museum is all highlights, and they pushed us to the curb at 1700 with everyone else with at least one gallery missed and several rushed through. Hours later, I'm still trying to sort out how I feel about all.
All my life I have seen pictures of the Wright Brothers' Flyer - now I have seen the Flyer itself, the actual machine that started the 20th century with a bang that is not yet done resounding.
There is the Spirit of St. Louis, the Apollo 11 Command Module, Chuck Yeager's sound barrier- breaking Glamorous Glennis, and Friendship 7, a piece of moon rock you can touch and Space Ship One, and that's just in the entrance hall. There are early rockets and late missiles, a V-1 buzz bomb and a V-2 assembled from leftover parts of captured examples and not uncoincidentally reminiscent of an Oldsmobile hood ornament - if only a little bit bigger than the whole car. There is the backup Skylab that you can walk through, and a backup LEM that could have gone to the moon, but didn't, and a moon suit that did, and came back with grey dust from the surface that is still ground into the fabric - there is more in that building than I can describe, more than I could see, more than I could put into this entry and still expect anyone to read it. These things have held me fascinated since I was a child; it is not often that you get to stand so forcefully in front of your youth.

Random Thoughts on Driving

Driving through Shenandoah has a different feel to it than taking the Parkway in spite of your path picking its way along the same mountains; perhaps this is because a different group of surveyors laid out the Skyline Drive. Different artistic choices. As well, some of the difference can be attributed to the trees ( reforested ares that have not caught up to the Parkway) and wide vistas over the valleys that have been heavily settled for years that seem nearly absent further south.
I found driving through Front Royal after leaving the Park a useful reacclimation for the interstate to follow. As Washington is little more than 60 miles away from the end of the Park, and our maps and schedule were not up to the less harried routes we prefer, we chose to rip along at 65 mph along with everyone else and get it over with sooner. The first forty minutes were actually not bad, but the next twenty five on the beltway, were, by the standards of driving to which I have recently become used, hell.
Alexandria, where our hotel is (we will not be driving into Washington), has no old cars in it save ours; as far as I can tell, we seem to be a category of one. The very little bit of it we have seen is a sea of new or nearly new vehicles, all of them zipping along to somewhere important.

Life is Old There

Shenandoah National Park stretches along the 105 mile Skyway Drive. Its camping facilities are less rustic than those at Great Smokey Mountain (for example, you don't have to pay $6.00 to shower in a small town outside), but at the same time the sites are more secluded and wildlife is abundant. Our first night there, as we were sitting by the campfire thinking deep thoughts, three deer were grazing behind us, about 20 feet away. If we made a loud noise, they would look up, then go back to grazing. A ranger came by, warning everyone that bears had been spotted in the campsite, and to make sure our food and supplies were locked in the car at night. We had seen a bear running across the road the day before, but none came to visit.

Our second day in the park we went whitewater canoeing on the Shenandoah River. We have been stillwater canoeing together almost as long as we've been married, and we like to go once a year if we can, just to keep our oar in, so we signed up for the "Beginner Whitewater" run. This was 8 miles along the lazy South Fork, mostly soft ripples with the occasional category one rapid, and one strong category two for flavour. It was a great deal of fun, and next time we will step it up a bit and look for more cat 2 with maybe even a cat 3 for spice. No pictures of this, we kept the cameras safe and dry in the car.

I am going to leave the rest for Rob to show and tell...

A brief announcement...

Rob and I will be spending the next two days camping in Shenandoah National Park. Although it is possible, it is unlikely that we will be within reach of electronic contact while in the park. Try my cell phone if you need to contact us.

See you on the other side, on the 5th.

End of the Parkway

Things come to an end; there are only 490 miles of Blueridge Parkway and even at an average speed of 35 mph with all the overlooks possible stopped for, sooner or later we must run out of road. That was today's event: every inch of the 490 miles driven over, several of them more than once. In all the days that we have been at it, the Parkway has become our private road, a source of wonder, awe and solace. We left it to find lodgings at night, or to descend into towns or cities on side trips, but we inevitably relaxed the moment we got back on it. We grew used to polite, interested and interesting strangers talking freely to us at overlooks and trails, to a route with no litter and no road signs taken by people who wanted to be there. Once or twice someone hurried past - and if there were more than that, by the end of our drive, I had forgotten them. Sunlight through tall green trees on a downhill curve, the slow snaking of the car across the ribs of a mountain, the sight of farms 1800 feet below a weathered stone wall tends to rearrange your priorities. Some men built that road for my personal enjoyment, and if all of them are now dead then I still owe them a great and unpayable debt. I will drive it again, but never again for the first time.

Sunday Driving

We started off the morning in historic Mt. Airy. This is the small town that served as the TV model for Mayberry, (that's where the Guy named Shoney is from, Rhiannon...)

Naturally our car was very excited, and fortunately for her we were able to get a picture of her with one of her idols, Sherriff Andy's squad car...

The rest of the day has been an idyllic Sunday drive. We stopped for a short hike at Cumberland Knob, then meandered through mountain farms to lunch at Groundhog Mountain. Here we were witness to an impromtu outdoor hymn sing, complete with banjo and guitars. We pulled over to a little shop called The Wormey Chestnut for a softdrink, then found our way eventually here to Roanoke, Virginia.

DJ, the Sunday drive is most definately not dead. Look, from up here on a clear day you can see last Tuesday...

Saturday

We lost an hour solving the Mystery at BE, not that we were in a hurry particularly. but annoying because we have so many better things we could have done with that hour.

Still keeping with our plans, though, we headed up Beech Mountain for breakfast (now brunch) at Fred's Backside Deli. For those of you who were with us the first time, Fred's is still the same. We ate on the back patio - and I had a nostalgic moment while I looked back on the last time we were there, and remembered sitting in that same spot enjoying hot chocolate on our first evening on the mountain.

One of my favourite authors often has his characters advise to "budget the luxuries first". I have to go one step sideways, and advise: Budget the Memories first.

We stopped after that at Linville falls, and took a short hike up a well manicured trail to see the falls from above. Then off and driving again. We are now in Mt. Airy, NC - the significance of which will be explained on our next post, so tune in tomorrow....

Mystery at Banner Elk

A day later it is posible to be charitable and say that Best Western at Banner Elk is under new management and still ironing out the bugs. Yesterday was a different matter.
We had misplaced the CAA books, and were limited when it came to phoning ahead for reservations to motels listed in the guide to the Parkway, but as we wanted to go to B. Elk and Beech Mountain anyway, this one seemed a good fit as they had internet access. We decided to swallow the cost of the place, which was more than we would like to pay. They had internet access all right but it was in the lobby as lightning strikes had messed up their equipment. We ate in the restaurant just off the lobby - the cheapest entre, once we had seen the prices, and paid cash. Against all expectations in a story like this, the food when it arrived, was exceedingly good - but I could have eaten about three of them. The restaurant was also under new management, and the staff had the harried air of a disaster relief crew running around frantically nailing one wheel after another back on the wagon. It took forever for the food to arrive, and we got the wrong bill once and the right bill with the wrong entre and amount on it next. We paid cash.
At checkout time the next morning, we were presented with a restaurant bill, charged to our room at 2213 hours (after the restaurant was closed) for $56.00, and signed in block letters by "James McCormick". This would have been merely laughable except for one thing; Jane had called in our reservations over a cell phone with a less than clear connection and we were in their computer from the get-go as "James McCormick". When Jane pointed out that this seemed to indicate that someone had access to the front desk's computer, and by extention our credit card number, she was told that this wasn't possible, and that someone must have overheard us in the restaurant mention both our room number and a name neither of us have.
We were politely doubtful. Or repeatedly doubtful; it took the staff member a long time to get the fraudulent bill off our bill, as she had already checked us out. The manager was away until Monday, she said. We called MasterCard.
We then went to the restaurant, and spent half an hour of repeated explanations and confusion all round there, the result of which was to be told that a new waitress had misplaced a bill charged to someone's room, come across the lobby to the front desk and described the diners to the desk clerk - who helpfully picked us out of a hat and accepted the bill on our behalf. Customer realations ain't just a river in Egypt...or something like that.

Wow

You would not believe the number of people today who wanted to rush past us on the Parkway instead of slowing down and admiring the scenery. The nerve of those people roaring past us as we motored along. Some people have no sense of decorum. I was forced to think bad language in their direction several times.

We made our way slowly to Spruce Pine, NC today - home of Gem Mountain. Gem Mountain Rocks! We were a little more knowledgeable about the types of Gems this time - I know last time I repeatedly threw away all of the ugly brown stones, only to find out that they were actually rubies and garnets. Just goes to show you should never take anything for granite. Gneiss!

This time, out of the bagfull of cutable gems, we picked out a nice juicy emerald for me, and a garnet for Rob.

Other than that, for those who know where it is, we are now in Banner Elk, and are planning to get breakfast at Fred's on Beech Mountain before leaving tomorrow.

Uncomplications

As we picked up the Chrysler from Pate's (following a taxi-ride as unpleasant as this morning's was relaxing), we were informed by their receptionist that it is to Pate's that come all of North Carolina's old car owners with their carb problems. If this was golf, I think we just got a hole in one.

Complications

The nature of our trip - and my love of old cars - is such that the engine could have fallen out on the road yesterday after we carried the whole car on our backs down from the the peak of Mt. Pisgah, and I'd still be saying 'that's what you have to expect on a trip like this,' and 'it could have been worse.' I am going to rationalize away in advance the impact of any problem with the Chrysler because nothing about a a new vehicle replaces any part of the experience of driving an old one. Consequently, you should view nothing of what follows as whining. Because the engine didn't actually fall out and it's possible to coast down from Mt. Pisgah, if you have to. Which we didn't. It could have been worse.
Toward the end of our first day driving through Great Smoky Mountain National Park (hereafter if necessary GSMNP) we noticed the motor had an occasional hiccup on some of the upward slopes. By the next day, the hiccup was a somewhat more obvious hesitation on our trip to Clingman's dome (not a dome but an observation tower; dome refers to the mountain). Once down the mountain and into town in Cherokee however, we noted no problems at all.
But this was only reality following the dictates of narrative drama, pushing in the foreshadowing so that when we came to start our drive on the Parkway, we wouldn't have a look of total confusion on our face when the real problems started, and there would be no excuse for the audience to say 'where did that one come from?' There is a reason Scotty always remarks that he 'dinnae likes the way the wee mendacitron generators are behavin', Capt'n,' somewhere in act One; it is just the warming up of Kirk's Graceful Babe-o' the-Week AutoDump Feature (tm), and should be regarded as the Universe unfolding as planned.
We had barely started to climb up from GSMNP on the Parkway when it was obvious that the Chrysler was having problems with that misbegotten Thermoquad. Originally at the top of my list of things I wanted to fix on the Chrysler, this carburator had moved to the top position of Things About Which I can do Absolutely Nothing Because There is No Time Left list when the govenment neglected to get me my refund on a timely basis. And to tell the truth, the carb had actually performed well enough for every other bit of this trip so far, well enough that I can claim no rueful regret at leaving without fixing it. No 'I knew I shoulda...' here, unless it was an 'I knew I shoulda' lived in a place where they get me my money back at least half as fast as they'd be down my throat if they thought I owed it.'
A decade younger than the engine it sits on, the Thermoquad is festooned with all sorts of pollution control fittings that are blocked off or left open, intended for emission control devices undreamed of in 1966. Its electric choke is disconnected, which makes cold starts interesting, if by that you mean a thoroughgoing nuisance. But once it is running, and right up until yesterday, it peforms just fine and gets a respectable distance out of the premium gas that runs through it.
Now it coughed and gasped and wanted to lay down and die. Going uphill was too much for it and it wasn't having any fun, and everything was uphill and more trouble than it was worth. If it stalled, and it did, it didn't want very much to start again, and it accelerated the car only in the sense that we picked up speed in terms of half minutes, not seconds. In hindsight, this is where rational (not rationalizing) people would have turned around at the nearest overlook and gone back down to Cherokee and tried to find a garage that still fixed carbs. Did we do that? Nooooo, with as many oooo's as you want to add. We continued to limp onwards to Asheville, a distance of eighty miles or so. The idea of going back never occured to us.
The speed limit on the Parkway is 45 mph, and we found that if we could get close to it, the Chrysler would not stall. Unfortunately, 45 mph is a best possible speed, and the scenery, curves and sheer drops at the side of the road are such that most people savour the experience and stick to 30 mph or less, depending how all three of those factors add up on the Wow! scale. This means that they get in your way, usually at the moment at which the road starts to climb for eight miles. Going downhill was not a problem for the carb; it behaved here as if there was nothing at all wrong with it. Against expectation, the road went up more than it went down.
Jane drove for nearly all of this portion; her skills at keping the engine alive and the car on the road so surpass mine that I gladly dumped the task in her lap and sat in the passenger seat and admired the deep drop-offs next to the curves with no guard-rails. Or speculated aloud if required as to the intelligence, ancestry, upbringing and medical conditions of all those in front of us who slowed down to look. One regrettable result of this hurried dash was that we were passing some of the most outstanding scenery of our trip, unable to properly appreciate it or even pull over for a longer look. But as we passed Looking Glass Rock, we threw caution to the winds and stopped for a picture - the overlook was sloped downhill in the direction we were going - but did not shut the car off. (The Rock gets its name from the fact that under the right conditions, when it is covered with a fine layer of water, it will reflect acres of sunlight. On this day, it was merely a vast, impressive rock.)
We made it to Asheville, and the carb started to behave itself again, still following the laws of narrative drama. At our motel, we hooked up the computer, and found the yellow pages and between the two, started making calls in what I thought would be a drawn out and difficult job, trying to find a garage that knew what a carburator was. But the first place I tried recommended the garage at which we ended up; Pate's is the best place for carbs or anything else, according to the taxi driver, who drove us back for a measly $28.00 (ten mile drive, and he most definitely did not dawdle or take the long way). Finding Pate's garage was yesterday; we had the car to the garage at 0800 this morning and were told that there was a carb kit in Charlotte for the Thermoquad, and even as I type now, they are working on it. We await their call, and another expensive taxi ride with bated breath, or at least as bated as you get when you go back to the motel and sleep away the morning, and a good chunk of the afternoon.

Soft Bread, Cold Butter - Our Memories of Camping in the Great Smokey Mountains

There are times in ones life that create such poignant memories that one can look back over the careworn years and savour them. Although we were there for only two days, (well, one and a half really) we experienced a richness of culture and nature that will carry with us forever.


Take the brave and noble Cherokee Indians (they still refer to themselves that way, so don't gasp and huff and tell me they're Native Americans now). Visualize their humble and busy village of Cherokee, where they labour all day as stereotypes, some in full native garb, dancing native dances on plywood stages in front of clean cut American families. I doubt this has changed since the 1950's, and in fact the whole town has a distinctly mid 20th century feel to it. Here, the proud peoples of these mountains bravely trek their good in from Mexico and China to sell in "Authentic Indian" wooden shops. With genuine Indian Moccassins (from Minnesota and complete with plastic beads and soles), and real turquoise jewellery (one horrid arrowhead and some cheap rings) mixed in with plastic play tepees and drums for the kids.

The real town is behind the frontier type village, and consists of the usual mix of side split ranch-style homes with satellite dishes and pools, small houses and trailers that seem common to all of rural Kentucky, Tenesee and North Carolina that we have seen so far.

There are many signs that the Cherokee do in fact take their heritage very seriously. Street names, even in the out of tourist areas, are written in English and Cherokee, they are trying to preserve the language and culture and pass it down - it is an affluent area, and they have created their wealth from the ignorance and prejudices of middle America.

Smokemont campgrounds was actually a flat area between hills. Very few trees, although we did have a flowering tree by our tent. We had the Ocanaluftee river flowing about 10 metres away...

Yesterday, as Rob said, we started on the real McCormick flavoured part of the holiday. I will download yesterday's pictures, and leave it for him to post....

Day Three, Great Smokey Mountain

The problem with putting to computer the events of two days past after a day eventful in and of itself is that I am not certain that I will recall all or even the best of it. Once again, we drove on major highways only when we had to, and on twisting, hilly secondary roads everywhere we could. By 4:30 (1630 for those of us with 24 hr time on our watches) we were back on a major highway (66) of necessity, crawling through the rain in heavy traffic, in Pigeon Forge, Tenn. Pigeon Forge (or at least the section of it we saw) is a garish tourist trap designed to separate people from money as quickly and painlessly as possible, and if they can do it by catering to everyone's stereotype of mountain life and hillbillies, well that's just fine too. Dolly Parton, of Dolly Parton fame, has built Dollywood, an amusement park that cashes in on the fame of Dolly Parton; the major point of access to this promised land is in Pigeon Forge. In case this fact has escaped the weary traveller, there are plenty of billboards
to remedy that very thing.
Eventually the volume of traffic in Pigeon Forge and the next big city, Gatlinburg, fell away and we realized that nowhere near half of these people were headed to Great Smoky Mtn park to steal our camping spot and we relaxed. As we were crossing the park to camp on the North Carolina side, we had thirty miles of twisty, tree-shaded road with fantastic views and no sane reason to travel over 45 mph. The skies continued to be overcast through the park, and we took pictures of the clouds moving up the slopes and through the trees because we could.
We came, we saw, we camped. Yesterday we drove back into the park and then to an observation point at Clingman's dome. This is the site of the world's longest one-way, half-mile walk; coming back down is much faster and easier. For variation, we tried a short segment of the Appalacian Trail at the dome. More great views, more photos, of which one is included below.
This morning I had close look at a mountain farm display at the NC side of the park (Jane passed on the opportunity as there was a persistent odor of horse and a likelihood of allergy problems thereby). I can say that the concept of the lazy, shiftless hill-dweller is - if the sheer work necessary to survive on a farm like this one is taken into account - a total fabrication.
Then we started on the Parkway; and here begins complications enough to warrant a separate post later.

Day 2 - From a Day 3 point of view

Yesterday was split nearly evenly into pleasant and unpleasant driving, all of the latter being on the interstate, and all of the former off it. Rural Ohio is flat and interesting, with mostly straight roads; rural Kentucky seems to have sold all their flatness to Ohio and thrown in their straight roads just to seal the bargain. There is only one road per valley, with miles of double-line sections where you can't pass anything, and guard-rails only when it is obvious that a car hurtling over the edge would do a triple somersault before it landed. Well, a double at least; I should not exaggerate.
With the exception of a very nice 1953 Buick custom seen on the interstate, we are driving the oldest car on the road. The Chrysler is perfectly set up for long trips. Lack of air conditioning is not a problem. Air flow from floor vents, vent windows and having every window down at 60 mph is such that overheating is not possible. You won't see us with our feet hanging out the windows, trying to cool off and drive at the same time.
By sheer accident, we ended up at a resort at the top of Pine Mountain, in a room with a private balcony overlooking hundreds of acres of trees and nothing else. Jane has taken pictures of this, but breakfast is screaming at us to come and find it and eat so I doubt any pictures of the place will be posted until later. Later being the next time we find internet access, of course. In fact, I will have to cut this post short as I am likely to be breakfast; Jane is that hungry.

Above is actually a view from the balcony - (this is Jane/Mum now) and the view from the dining room in the lodge is here.

Starting Out - June 23rd

Naturally, nothing went as we had originally planned it. We didn't get on the road until 15:00, between one thing and another. With the car as tightly packed as it could go. I would show you the picture I took of the trunk, except that my new camera didn't seem to keep it. Here is one of the inside of the car though...

Our first official stop on tour - Tavistock Ontario! Wes and David are actually on tour with Dutch Boy (drum corps) and Wes, of course had forgotten some very vital things. We were lucky enought to get there just as they were going to start a run through of the show...

Most of my day was spent trying to get what I want out of my new camera. Upon learning that my medium format film is now almost impossible to get, I cried for a while, then bought a digital camera.

It is very, um, sharp. 10 Megapixel images etc..., but there are so many things I can't do! The worst part of it is that there is a delay from the time I spot the picture, to the time it takes it. This has resulted in untold numbers of perfect moments gone - do they make cameras without delays?

Toledo was lovely. I sneezed a lot while I was there, which we are putting down to the horse racing track across the road. Here is a picture from our romantic hide-a-way.

Almost Ready

This is a test to see how the whole 'blog thing works. I am not computer illiterate, I've just always been a little more at home with a dos prompt than a mouse - so creating a web anything this easily seems too much like magic.

Here we go...I am hitting the publish button....