This morning started out like every other one. Up at 10, out the door just around 11 or 1130, and right onto the road planned out. First on the agenda was the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL, which has a large US space museum attached to it. Who wouldn't want to see a Saturn V? From there, I continued on to Nashville.
Except that every sentence in that last paragraph was a complete lie. The morning actually started around 8, and we were out the door by 9 to grab breakfast. After that, I dropped Aliyya off to her classes and hit the road...for Jiffy Lube, to get a somewhat-overdue oil change. From there, I put in the address for the space museum into the GPS, and decided the northern route (via Chattanooga, TN) looked more interesting than the southern (through Birmingham, AL), and picked that.
That's where everything went off-plan, and wonderfully so. Upon getting into Chattanooga, I realized that I could go about 150 miles west to see spaceships, or 150 miles northeast to see scenery - specifically, Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Given that I was just at the Air and Space Museum a few days ago, and my last attempt to see this particular range of mountains was foiled by weather (see the post complaining about rain a couple days ago), it wasn't a hard decision. I just kept going on I-75 N, and eventually switched off to 40-E towards Knoxville. Traffic was minimal, scenery was great, life was good.
Everything came crashing to a halt (not literally, calm down) once I got off 40 onto TN-66. First of all, all of a sudden there was a huge amount of traffic heading off the highway. To make matters worse, this traffic passed through Pigeon Forge, TN. It's very clear that the main industry in Pigeon Forge is tourism, because the main strip (66) is absolutely lousy with tourist traps of every variety. That in itself isn't bad - what's annoying is the extent to which they all try to outdo each other in garishness to try to suck you in. It was sort of reminiscent of the huge amount of commercial development around Niagara Falls, and that's not a good thing. It wasn't a good omen for the approach to the park. The next town on the way in, Gatlinburg, also had a main street with lots of tourist attractions, but at least here they've done a good job trying to make them blend in, not blow out your eyes. The traffic was still bad, though.
All the sins of the outside towns were forgiven upon getting into the park, however. As befits a national park, Great Smoky Mountains is beautiful (and on a Monday afternoon, not super crowded). The following video will give you some idea of the contrast. The first town you'll see is the super-built-up Pigeon Forge; after a short woody segment, you'll see Gatlinburg; after that, you enter the park:
At the recommendation of one of the rangers at the visitor center, the first place I went was the lookout point at Newfound Gap. This lookout point is along the ridge of the Smoky Mountains, and lies on the Tennessee-North Carolina border, which means that everyone is obligated to take a picture with one leg on either side of the border:
The views from the lookout (and the road approaching the lookout) aren't too shabby either:
The Newfound Gap lookout is also a connection point to the Appalachian Trail, an unbroken footpath that runs over 2000 miles from Maine down into the South:
I hiked about 0.1% of the total length, and then decided to move on to another lookout point recommended in a guidebook. Clingman's Dome is the highest point in the park, and the third-highest point in all of the eastern United States, so it offers a great view of the park. By the time I got there around 5:45 or 6, the temperature had already dropped to around 40-45 degrees, so I packed up a couple extra layers and took on the half-mile uphill climb to get to the lookout post at the top of Clingman's. Though it's a bit of a climb (especially with the 6,000+ ft altitude), there's no doubt that the view from up there is great:
I figured as long as I was there so late, I might as well wait for sunset and see how everything looked; there was one other photographer already there with the same idea. What I don't think anyone up there counted on was just how cold it would get. The temperature was already in the low 40s, and at the high altitude, winds were constantly gusting past us from all directions - giving a windchill that was certainly subfreezing. Worth it, though:
I stopped taking pictures when I was fumbling with the camera too much - it's hard to manipulate a shutter when you can't feel your fingers. Put down for the night in a Pigeon Forge hotel (the one nice thing about ridiculous tourist traps is that the oversupply of hotel rooms on a down day = cheap rates).
Tomorrow: Pigeon Forge, TN to Nashville, TN (forreal this time?)
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