Saturday, December 31, 2005
Long Day's Journey Into Night
Today our plan was to drive from Shelli's through Pigeon Forge and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park back to Kristin's parent's house in Flowery Branch. The drive started fine, until we reached the boulevard from Pigeon Forge to Gatlinburg. I'd been on that road once before, several years ago, and then it was bumper-to-bumper traffic, which I had attributed to the Classic Car Show that was going on in town.How naive I had been. If anything, the traffic was worse than it had been then. After traveling what seemed to be about three and a half miles in just over an hour, I finally agreed with Kristin to abandon the route and instead go around the park and back to the Interstate than travels its perimeter.
Now that drive was exactly what I had pictured. It was the most beautiful drive, we took, curving through little farm fields dotted with bright red barns and sheds, with the largest mountains we had seen on the trip rising like a magnificent matte painting just beyond. At one point we found a small cemetery atop a hill called Fox Cemetery, which had been established in 1787. I got our to take a picture of the row upon row of gravestones that had eroded down to just pockmarked stubs of stone sticking up out of the ground.
At the top of the hill I came across an eerie sight: a freshly dug grave, whose headstone was just as old as all the others around it. That in of itself was unusual, but what made it downright creepy were the cloven hoof marks that criss-crossed the fresh soil. I can only surmise that one of the cows from the nearby field had wandered loose. Either that, or the Devil went down to Georgia looking for a soul to steal.
In the next little town we found an enormous factory, the largest industrial facility we had seen in the area. n It paralleled the road for several miles, while I wondered what it could be - paper mill? Natural gas facility? No, it turned out to be the headquarters of Bush's Baked Beans. Rrrrrrrrrrroll that beautiful bean footage.
After some hairpin turns, we made it to the Interstate and went south. It grew dark rapidly, giving us the most gorgeous sunset over the Mountains we had found to be impassable. And, like the Fellowship of the Ring, we found that the only route available to us then was through Moria. In our case, Moria didn't contain a Balrog, but an hour and a half straight of Kira crying her lungs out. I think I might have preferred an army of snarling orcs.------------------------------------------------