On our way home. To sum it up…
AT hike: FREAKIN AWESOME! My favorite place in the park is just about anywhere on the AT. Amazing. You can hop on it and in a 1/4 mile all of the insanity of the rest of the place melts away. Peace and quiet and the vast majority of the people you run into are there for the same reason as you so they respect you and the trail. You form a unique kinship with them. Very cool.
Loonie taking in the view from the highest stretch of the entire Appalachian Trail.
Silers Bald shelter
The trips through Gatlinburg: FREAKIN SUCKED! Other than the trip down from Clingmans after the AT hike, we hadn’t planned on going through the place but with the lower than expected crowds and decision to spend time in Elkmont, we didn’t have much choice. Would have taken too long to go in at Metcalf Bottoms only to have to backtrack. And even with the smaller crowds it’s still a complete mess. Alright, enough of that.
The colors were amazing…
The hike to the Avent cabin was cool…
Seeing the bears was way cool…
And Little River and Porters Creek were beautiful as always.
Weather was so so but we never really got much rain when we were out and about so that was good. Other than a dude I went off on for stopping in the middle of 441 and backing traffic up for a mile just so he could get a pic of a bear, people were pretty considerate.
You may have noticed that I hadn’t put up any galleries for this trip. Well, for one, there just hasn’t been time. But the main reason is that WordPress isn’t really designed to be a photo hosting site and you only get 3 gb of storage. I could put up links to our Picasa albums but I’m really fed up with Picasa. It looks hokey and we only get 17 gb of storage there. So, I’m gonna redo the albums on Flickr or some other, more classy photo host and link to that from here. That’s going to be a MAJOR endeavor. Ugh!!! I wish Google would fix Picasa or come up with an alternative so I could just let them run my whole life!
Now then, I gotta get back to work. My cohort is pulling her hair out!
A final note: We did hear back from Terra and she made it back safe and sound. We were a bit concerned when we dropped her off with Mark at his car. He had a big bow saw in the back and backpackers don’t typically carry freakin bow saws! Were we sending the girl off with a serial killer? But who knows, maybe he was pruning grandma’s trees before the trip. It’s all good.
More to come …
Bulldog's Droppings 