Wow, first let me apologize, because I suck at blogging, haha. It has been awhile but we are back from our trip to Tennessee and I have quite of bit to go over so it will probably broken up into a few blogs. Sorry but I don't feel like writing a novel tonight. Well well were to start. I guess we start from the top. The week before we left was crazy busy with getting everything organized and packing. It did fly by which was good. Thursday I got off early so we could take the Jer Bear to meet my parents for his week vacation with my parents and scooby. It was a bitter sweet moment. It meant that our vacation began but we wouldn't see our little puppy for 11 days, the longest time we had been with out him. We didn't get back till about 1030pm, a little later then we had hoped so we quickly finished packing and hit the hay. We got up at 6am and headed over to Kelly's parent's. The plan was to leave a 7am but we had forgot to turn off the AC at home so I had to rush back there about 645 and turn that off and got back there about 720 and off we went. The four of us in a brand new ford Taurus. It's a pretty nice car but the seat belts in the back seat suck! They aren't adjustable at all and cut into your neck, so I didn't wear it at all. All day Friday was spent driving. We drove from St. Paul to Madison, around Chicago and through Indianapolis and stopped for the day in Columbus IN. Bob, Kelly's dad, drove the whole way. We did about 11 hours or so the hotel was nice and it felt great to sleep. We got up pretty early again and hit the road. I manned my station in the back, put on the head phones and proceeded to read my Bike Magazine. I usually don't read them cover to cover but I did this one even all the adds.
On Saturday we drove through Kentucky, Louisville and Lexington and about 1 or so we got to Sevierville, the start of the craziness, about 12 miles from Gatlinburg. Unfortunately it was a very popular time to arrive at the giant tourist trap. It took us about 2 hours to get to our hotel. On the way we past about every single restaurant I can think of and some of them 2 or 3 times like Cracker Barrel. The sure love those down south. We also passed about every type of amusement place you can think of, 15 mini-golf places, and a handful of sex shops. I thought this was a bit odd, in the states of Kentucky and Tennessee they had tons of "couples" shop and romantic gift shops. Even giant super outlet stores for sex stuff. I kind of wanted to see what in the world they could feel a store the size of Home Depot with but I would have felt weird making Kelly's parents stop, haha.
When we finally got to our place we all pretty much collapsed and took a nap and then walked around the area by our place. It was a cool little town, not as trashy or touristy as Seviersville and Pigeon Forge, the first two towns you drove through and it was separated by 3 miles of scenic highway.
Sunday we woke up early because Kelly underestimated the speed limit when she booked our rafting trip. It was only 110miles from our place but we were told it would take 2hrs and 30mins and they weren't lying. We had to go part way through the Smokey Mountain National forest at 45mph or less and then into NC, adding another state to our list we've visited together, and then back down and around to the very south east corner of TN. The drive was really pretty. I will have to say that all in all that entire area is extremely beautiful. We left on our rafting trip at about 1030am. It felt a little weird since I've only rafted twice, both time on the same river with the same company and this company did some things a bit different. The rafting was fun but I still think the gorge is way cooler. We did raft the Olympic section from the Atlanta games. That was pretty sweet. After rafting we were all pretty beat and made our way home. It was ridiculous we thought we would take a different route home and stayed in TN. On the map it showed it as 4 lane highway and it was but it was only 45mph and up to 50 in a couple spots but we had to slow down to 35 for ever little town. The worst part was the road was nice and pretty straight! So it took us even longer to get home.
That night we ate a little pub down on the corner. The food was really good. It felt like we had been on vacation for a week already and it was only Sunday. I guess that's a good thing. At least it wasn't flying by.
Keep it real
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