Looking Back on North Carolina

October 1, 2023

We drove west to Jordan Lake outside Raleigh (‘rah-leigh’, not ‘rally’) and pulled into a beautiful forest setting with tall pines and a clear pine-needle clad forest floor. The state park was quiet, private and had sites well spaced from each other. It was dry, 65 degrees, and the skies were clear with no wind. It felt like heaven coming from the climate we had just left. In the Outer Banks the temperature never fluctuated. It stayed between 70-75 degrees the whole time, never cooling off at night. Yet, even given the delightful change of scenery and conditions, I couldn’t shake a feeling of disappointment upon parking our rig and finishing the setup process. I felt bad for my kids. Is this lifestyle good for them? Are they thriving? Or are they sick of each other and missing their friends and dying for some space from their siblings and parents? 

An obvious homeschooling family walked by – early October, mid-week, four kids and the oldest had braids and a skirt – and I felt a stirring of distaste. Is that what we look like? Do people look at us and wonder why we have to be different? Why do we have to buck the norm, give conformity the middle finger? Why can’t we just fall in line with everyone else?

I was very self-conscious in the early part of our trip and still was at this point. I know people looked at us and judged us as we ate lunch in a restaurant in the early afternoon on a Tuesday in October. Or as we rode our bikes around a campground full of retired couples in the late morning on a Thursday. I think I felt irresponsible. My train of thought would go like this as I saw older couples give us the overly long look, maybe my kids should be in school, maybe this is all wrong, maybe they won’t gain anything from this experience and we will have just wasted a bunch of money and set them back academically.

So I worried about their mental well-being and happiness. They got in a big fight that night and one of them sought refuge in the bathroom and was sad and we could all hear and we tried to make it like we couldn’t and that everything was normal. But it wasn’t and I worried.

There was good bike riding and paddleboarding at Jordan Lake. An empty site had great beach access, so one of us would drive the car down with the paddleboards and beach gear in the back and the rest of us would ride bikes down. The water was clear and because it was October we had the place to ourselves. Sunsets were surprisingly beautiful. 

We have a thing for sunsets. I mean, who doesn’t? Sienna is the best at getting us out to see them. She motivates us on many evenings to get up and go outside. We would have missed many sunsets if not for her. She is a sunset sommelier. 

We set our tent up outside to offer some options to the sleeping arrangements. Teagan missed sleeping with her momma so the two of them could sleep out there, or as more often happened, I got booted to the tent so they could get the bed to themselves. I didn’t mind.

We had some roaring campfires with the wood we had hauled all the way from Kiptopeke and never got a chance to burn. Those little packets of Magical Flames are fun to toss on the fire. It was dark at night, I mean pitch. The girls liked to tell us they wanted to go for a walk and they would run ahead and turn off their headlamps and hide behind trees waiting for us. They would jump out and scare us and the first time they did this it worked! The tenth time not so much. Big millipedes and spiders hung out by the bathhouses at night. We’d touch the millipedes and they’d curl up and we’d wait for them to uncurl and resume their march to God-only-knows where. 

I had the girls do a little map exercise. They had to draw maps of our campsite (large-scale) and then one of the campground loops (small-scale) with notations and locations for things like the bathrooms, dumpsters, water spigots, etc. I would then try to follow their maps and make some edits. More than learning anything about maps, however, it was an exercise in team work. Who was going to hold the paper and make the notations? Who was going to decide which way to go? Could they work together? I think when they are around us it is more of a competition between them for our attention. When they get out on their own, however, they have a little hierarchy amongst them and they do better. So these activities always start poorly because they want to show us what they can do and someone usually gets upset. When they return, though, they are proud and in good spirits. 

There is a lesson here. Kids generally don’t want to do something their parents suggest. Let’s go hiking! Let’s go bike riding! Let’s go to a museum! Let’s go do a scavenger hunt! They never want to do these things (maybe those just aren’t great suggestions), but as soon as they get out there they love it. It’s the timeless quandary for parents. Why do kids make it so hard to get out the door and do things they eventually enjoy doing?

There is a book that’s been on my list for a long time by Alastair Humphreys, an author/adventurer that I have loved following over the years, called The Doorstep Mile. Humphreys was an adventurer in the old style doing huge, hard, epic adventures around the globe. Things like walking across the Empty Quarter, bicycling around the world and rowing the Atlantic. Things not to be taken lightly. Things most of us never even dream of doing. Riding around the world by bike I could handle. Rowing the Atlantic? Never in a million years. His inspiration came from people like Wilfred Thesinger and Sir Ranulph Fiennes. 

But something changed in him and he dreamed up a wonderful idea called the Microadventure. These are adventures that any of us can wrap our heads around. They are right around the corner. The simple idea of a Microadventure is that most of us work from 9 to 5 so why not tackle an adventure from 5 to 9. Use the time we have to get out there and not to dream about the ‘big one’ that might only come around once in a lifetime…if we’re lucky. His simple idea was to head out after work and spend the night out under the stars in a sleeping bag on a hill and then wake early enough to make it back to work.

I readily took to this idea. My microadventures were overnight bikepacking trips or overnight missions to climb 14ers in Colorado’s high country. I couldn’t believe how one night out under the stars could be so exhilarating. In some cases I only spent 14 hours away from home and yet they were still profound experiences.

In his book he talks about the difficulty for all of us to just take that first step out the door on any undertaking. It does not have to be a monster expedition or an overnight backpacking trip. It can be any endeavor and the first step can be the most difficult and the most likely to stop us in our tracks.

I think our children can easily prevent us from taking that first step. It’s just too dang frustrating to get them prepared for an outing so let’s just forget the whole thing. I sometimes don’t want to face the world for whatever reason. Maybe it’s a little agoraphobia. I stay inside because it’s easier than having to talk to people, or face a potentially embarrassing situation, or find myself trapped by a crowd, or enclosed in a small, or even large, space (cruise ships surprisingly fall in this category for me as you will see later). The Doorstep Mile can be difficult to take for the smallest of reasons or the largest.

We took a huge step out our door when we decided to sell everything and leave. But sometimes even the smallest of steps is hard. I try to think about that huge step when I am confronted with a small one I don’t want to take.

At Jordan Lake we learned that an 8-year old girl had been abducted from a New York State Park. Mom texted me to make sure I had heard about it and to urge me to keep my kids close. We told the girls what had happened – in an edited version – and laid down some rules that none of them were to go off on their own and that they were to always be on the lookout and aware of their surroundings. According to the article, the girl had been riding bikes with her family around the campground loop. They returned to their campsite and she wanted to do one more loop. She never returned and they found her bike lying by the side of the road. She had been kidnapped and ransomed to the family for money. The perpetrator left a note in the family’s mailbox and officers stationed near the house matched fingerprints on the note to a set of prints in their database for a prior drunk driving arrest. The girl made it back to her family, thank goodness, but not without some trauma.

It’s a horrible thing to think about. Even now it gives me the creeps and makes my heart rate soar. It makes me mad and scared. I can’t keep my kids safe all the time. None of us can, but I was living a lifestyle that was decidedly unsafe and insecure. So what to do? Watch them like hawks? Carry on like nothing had happened? After all, these sordid things happen all the time in our messed up world. It cast a pall for several days and made everyone uneasy.

October 3, 2023

We went out for sushi one night in Apex, NC. One of the top cities in the country to live in according to a welcome sign on the side of the road. It just looked like more suburban sprawl to me. While the girls finished up in the bathroom Wendy and I leaned against the Tahoe as the sun set on the horizon and talked about how other families do this. Some families we’d met or read about had started off traveling for a year and then extended and did another. Other families had set aside two years. ‘Why does it seem so hard for us?’ we wondered. ‘Why are we always so tired and seemingly at the end of our ropes? Why do our kids bicker so much? Do other traveling families have kids who are better suited for this? Are we moving too fast? Not getting good sleep? Why do we feel like it will be a miracle if we make it a full year?’

I think the honeymoon period was over at this point and the reality of our situation – that we truly lived on the road and were not on an extended vacation – had finally set in.

October 5, 2023

Pint-sized Pastures is a petting zoo in Sanford, NC. We stayed a night there with Patrick and his family out on the fringes of his pasture hard up against the trees. When we arrived he was busy loading his animals and gave us quick directions for driving through the farm and getting out into the pasture. He told us to come see the animals before he left. We drove the rig through some fields and out to a faint sandy double track and parked in the flattest spot we could find. The girls really wanted to see the animals so we walked over and properly introduced ourselves as best as we could to a guy who was trying to wrangle pigs, miniature donkeys, goats and a cow into his trailer. He was taking them to a fall festival at a local elementary school. The pig seemed to be the devil himself to catch. Once he finally managed, almost sprawling on the ground to do so, the poor animal squealed to high heaven in protest to being lifted off the ground. While gesturing at the pig-tantrum unfolding in his arms, he said, in his lilting Carolina accent, “You know that old expression, ‘When pigs fly!’” Then he winked.

He unceremoniously chucked the indignant pig in the open trailer door and hurriedly closed it then held out his hand for an overdue handshake. He and his family had purchased the farm years ago and finally bought a couple animals to graze. They bought more animals to pay for the first ones. Then they needed more to pay for those so he finally turned it into a petting zoo. He had been a middle school teacher and a pastor and was a genuinely nice guy. We purchased some pecans and walnuts and donated some money for his farming endeavors in exchange for a place to stay for the night.

It was an unusual place to camp for the night. Large wolf spiders fled the fields in front of us and sought refuge on the sand underneath the camper. They were as big around as the lid of a coke can. We threw a frisbee at sun down and cooked some marinated chicken strips on our grill outside. Our rig is fully self-contained and we enjoy the opportunity to boondock when we can.

In the morning he and his little son Asher gave us a proper tour. The girls finally got a chance to do some goat yoga, which I have never fully understood, but the photo op was priceless. Bella, their yoga goat, then followed us around for the rest of the tour. She would stand on my feet when we stopped walking. We met Charlie, the farm’s Scottish Highland longhorn and a beautiful, gentle creature. The girls hung out in the rabbit enclosure while we chatted with Patrick. He had to load up for yet another fall festival in town so we did our own loading up and hit the road. We waved goodbye as we drove the dirt track out of the farm back to the highway.

Journal Entry: October 6, 2023

“Today was quite a day. We blew a tire in the Sheetz gas station. It must have shredded on the road and we got lucky that it didn’t deflate until we stopped for gas. Ava and I walked out first with our snacks and I just stopped and stared, trying to comprehend what I was looking at. ‘Ava, is that tire flat or is it me,’ I asked her. ‘Oh,’ she said and her tone said it all. I fixed the flat in the gas station parking lot, with some help from a friendly tow-truck driver. We tried Camping World for new tires and were directed to Piedmont Truck and Tire. Those guys hooked us up with four new trailer tires and they also properly inflated the Tahoe tires. We were back on the road in a couple hours.

As I drove down the highway later in the day a driver entering the highway from an on-ramp did so a little too slowly and I couldn’t change lanes to give him space so I had to slow way down. I waved an arm in frustration and in response the guy flipped us off and then raised a gun to show us through his truck cabs rear window. Yikes.”

Journal Entry: October 7, 2023

“Beautiful fall day in the 60’s with a gentle breeze rustling the foliage as dry leaves float to the ground. Walnuts are thumping onto the metal roofs of the abandoned homes down the hill. A film crew is roaming the grounds working on a music video. Elaine, the owner, gave us a brief tour and told us some stories of their renovation of House 20 for the show, ‘In with the Old’. When we mentioned our spooky night walk last night she remembered another show, ‘Mysteries of the Abandoned’, that recorded voices in the old houses. I am not surprised. This is a class A experience in terms of experiencing an abandoned town. This was once a thriving cotton mill town that is now nothing more than old homes being taken over by nature. There is a feeling of the spirit of all the families that lived here that permeates this place. An old tunnel leads to a former root cellar – or ‘shine hiding place. Old outhouses lean askew, reservoir tanks with stone walls are lined with ivy and cement staircases disappear into the wilds.”

The Henry River Mill in Hickory, NC is a remarkable place. It is famous far and wide for being the filming location of Katniss Everdeen’s home in District 12 in The Hunger Games. The current owner is a little peeved that so many people only want to come because of the star power it gleaned from The Hunger Games. She makes it clear that there is so much more to the location than the movie that made it famous. That in fact, The Hunger Games is only one small part of its storied past. In short, it was a textile mill that thrived until the 1970’s until the mill burned down. The families that lived and worked there were issued currency that could only be used in the town. So in a sense they were almost indentured servants. Yet there was a sense of community portrayed in the pictures from the times and the stories we were told during our tour. There was a mill, a general merchandise building, 35 worker homes, a bridge, the dam itself and all of it is now in disrepair and being consumed by Mother Nature.

We parked the RV next to the store, were handed a key fob for the gate in case we needed to come and go after hours and at five o’clock Donovan, our host, headed home for the night. The place was ours. The sun set over the Henry Fork River as we watched leaves and walnuts tumble to the ground. Fall felt so good. I played some guitar on a large patio area with string lights overhead. Dinner was pasta inside and then as full dark descended we grabbed some flashlights and ventured out into the old, abandoned town. There was a steep walk down the hill toward the river past the old homes, many with holes in the walls, broken windows, and caved in roofs. We swept the beam of our lights through the windows and saw broken bottles and kitchen utensils, old bed frames and even some dolls in the dust. Cobwebs loomed in the shadows. The mill itself was so grown over that we didn’t even attempt to get close. The place reminded me of a scene from the Blair Witch Project.

Elaine, the current owner, has an infectious passion for the place and she relayed her projects and thoughts on a private tour. At one point an actor from the filming of a music video, on the grounds at the same time as us, swept past covered in fake blood. We heard random screams as they shot their takes. 

That night we had dinner in Hickory and were refused five waters at the bar while we waited for a table. “I’m too busy pouring $10 drinks,” we overheard the bartender say to her friend at the other end of the bar. “Did she just say she was too busy pouring $10 drinks to pour us a few waters?” I asked Wendy. But Wendy was already gearing up for a fight, I could tell. “Hon, just leave it. Forget it,” I said as the girls all barged in to ask what had happened. I could see they were all getting ready for a fight, too. They were all making up sly comebacks.

“Guys, come on, let’s just go, our table’s ready,” I implored.

Should I have sent my 12-year old into the bar with a witty comeback for a bitch of a bartender? Remember those old IBM NFL commercials in the 80’s? “You make the call!”

We walked through Union Square after our meal, which was saved from being soured by our experience with the bartender by a great waitress, who, after being told we were traveling, went on and on about all the places she wanted to go. Our adventure had inspired her to share her love of travel and her desire to explore. Union Square was a cute little plaza with lots of outdoor seating at restaurants and bars, live music, propane fire pits, string lights and little boutique shops. There were families and couples out and about and lots of indistinct chatter and laughing. We felt like exotic outsiders from a distant land looking in on the world as it went about its normal business. There was a shared feeling of discovery and I know we all felt a buzz from the tingling of our bonds as they were pulled ever more tight. We all talked at once as we strolled through the night and, by chance, found the town’s mural.

“Girls, get in there, we need a picture!” I shouted.

October 9, 2023

“I was one of ten. Seven brothers and two sisters. But they are all dead now. Just me left. I grew up here in Asheville, remember one winter when there was snow up to my knees. I got hit by a car a couple years ago and broke a leg. Woke up in the hospital. Couldn’t remember how I got there.”

Isaiah had a mouth full of broken teeth and sour gums and it was all I could do to understand him. But I listened because my guess is that not many people did. He was homeless and had taken a seat next to me on a bench after he had beckoned if it was ok and I had offered with a wave and a scooch down to give him room. I offered him a cookie from our bag of half a dozen that we had bought at Mary’s Mountain Cookie shop earlier in the day. It was a big, plate sized peanut butter cookie and he ate some, but discreetly because I think he struggled to chew it. He had a cane which he’d had ever since the car accident. He had a scraggly gray beard in ragged clumps on his face and an old fisherman style cap on his head. I watched him panhandle next to me as people walked by and watched as most of them barely gave him the time of day. Someone finally handed him a bill.

“Nice,” I said, raising my eyebrows.

“Yeah, every now and then, you know. Every now and then,” he responded.

The girls finally came out of Urban Outfitters in front of which I had sat to wait for them. Seeing them with their shopping bags and nice clothes and all the other fancy people walking by with their starbucks and their health and their families and friends made me suddenly very sad for Isiah. Here’s a guy with a whole life story just like the rest of us but most of us don’t take the time to hear it. He lives outside the normal bounds of society.

Kind of like us.

October 10, 2023

Wendy had some bad vertigo this morning and I felt for her as we got ready to get on the road. Still, I couldn’t wait to pull out of the Asheville KOA West. I-40 is so close that our camper literally shook with the reverberations of semis roaring by. You could hear them coming and I couldn’t help tensing as I waited for the crescendo to pass. Otherwise, it was a wonderful campsite and a wonderful time of year to be there. The staff came through on their golf carts with a daily delivery of hot cocoa. They had Tom Hanks’s ‘Hot Chocolate’ playing on a portable bluetooth speaker, hot chocolate piping hot from thermoses and all the accompaniments like cinnamon, whipped cream and marshmallows. The full nine yards. My kids loved that! The office was decked out with spiders and skeletons and lots of cobwebs and psuedo gravestones and the like. They had a community fire pit blazing at night with live music. It was great.

But those semis thundering by in the night. Good lord.

October 11, 2023

It is 39 degrees this morning at the Smokemont Campground in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the crisp bite of fall feels so good we can hardly bear it. Reminds us of home and how much we love the season. It’s the first time in four months that I’ve needed to put on my puffy coat and hat. There are no hook-ups here so we pulled out the sleeping bags last night to make sure no one got too cold. It is frosty inside the camper. I can see my breath. 

We don’t have a generator, or an inverter, in case you’re wondering. I decided I didn’t want to deal with the weight and the storage issues of hauling it and extra fuel. I had gross vehicle weight rating concerns and needed to count every pound. I bought some solar panels to charge our batteries and I figured we could handle some hot nights, or cold nights, on those occasions we stayed off the grid. I can handle cold nights much better than I can hot. 

I was here many years ago and on this first morning back I look around the campground and try to recall my visit. At St. Lawrence U back in the 90’s SS and I, as Seniors, took the Outing Club van south to the Smokies. We had four or five freshmen with us on their first backpacking trip. One of the few criteria for joining the OC – besides being enormously suave and capable of running around the house naked if the foosball Gods were not in your favor – was to lead three overnight trips a year, usually to the Adirondacks, and ideally introducing inexperienced people to the outdoors. Simply put, don’t just go on a trip with a bunch of your buddies. Try to find some people who were interested but maybe didn’t have the know-how, the wherewithal or the gear to do so. 

SS, using his formidable powers of persuasion, commandeered a 15-passenger, white Ford Econoline van for the OC and we built a wooden rack for the top to hold backpacks and camping gear. Even now I am impressed with our ambition. That drive from Canton, NY must have been a doozy and I’m guessing we didn’t stop for the night. This was before smartphones. Meaning, we most likely used a Rand McNally to find our way down there. Got our backpacking permit in person when we arrived. And used a topo map and a compass to find our way along our chosen route to the various backcountry camps we stayed in.

It rained all three days we hiked. It rained at night. It was raining when we woke up to make breakfast. Our feet squelched in our boots and our tents and sleeping bags were sodden by the last night. I’ve learned now that the Great Smoky Mountians – a National Biosphere Reserve due to its remarkable diversity of plant life – receives, on average, 85” of rain a year. That’s over 7 feet of rain! The sun broke through the clouds on our last day as we approached our van and I can still see the tent flys, sleeping bags, rain jackets, clothing, socks and backpacks hanging from every possible protrusion on the van to dry out. We must have looked like true dirt bags and I think we were a little proud that we were.

I have this vision in my head of one of our trip mates, I can’t remember her name or even her face now, sitting just out front of the Mount Camerer overlook. I remember it was a beautifully constructed tower of stone and timber with 360 degree views out the glass windows. As is the case from any vantage point in the Smoky Mountains it had a stunning, endless view of the ridge lines running away to the horizon. Perhaps on this day the view wasn’t as vast, but still captivating, with mist and tattered fog moving to and fro. I remember her sitting on a rock and staring and I could tell from her posture and her demeanor that she was experiencing the wonderful rewards that can come from any hard endeavor in the mountains. She had never done a trip like this. She didn’t really know us. We checked equipment out for her from the Outdoor Program’s inventory. And she suffered through rain and mud and the worst possible conditions for a first foray into the mountains. But was it? Was there not some camaraderie formed by experiencing it together? And forging through the discomfort together? From what I could tell of her moment there on Mount Cammerer I remember thinking that perhaps, just perhaps, we had developed a new outdoor fanatic. Someone who would never be able to get enough of the outdoors and the tonic to our ailments that it can provide. Someone who would always search for that deep sense of contentment and peace that can be found out there.

So it felt good to be back here again. I have often thought about that trip and about that girl. What has become of her? Where did she end up? Does she still get outside? I hope so. I wish the same for my own girls. That they can discover the peace and solace available for those who seek it in the last wild places left to us. That they can appreciate it when they see it. 

It’s not enough to just know it is out there, as some will way. It’s one thing to know there is gold in them thar hills, another to know how to extract it.

As I attempted to dredge up my past we went for a hike on the Appalachian Trail and toured the Smokies. Who was that person that came here almost 30 years ago? Would I recognize him if I bumped into him on the trail? Would my kids? What would they think?

After a 5 mile out-and-back on the AT, talking endlessly of what our thru-hiker trail names would be, much like we used to come up with river names on our rafting trips, we headed to Clingman’s Dome. There we hiked another mile to the summit and the quirky watchtower with its swirling, Marble Run-style walkway. From the Dome the views stretch out forever. I tried to get a family shot with Sienna’s Nikon (a gift from her grandpa) using the self-timer and our tripod. While the family was lined up along the railing I fumbled looking for the timer settings. Of course, everyone thought I was taking pictures so they stopped walking through the shot which then clogged up all the traffic on the watchtower. So the girls are all standing there, now smiling awkwardly and mumbling about their father under their breaths and I’m trying desperately to find the damn timer settings. Finally, I just waved everyone through and asked a lady if she would take the picture for us. This brought on an I-told-you-so look from Wendy because I am infamous for declining offers from people to take our picture and equally uncomfortable asking people to take our picture. 

Back at the parking lot a father was walking with his wife and son and the son kept stopping in front to talk to them over his shoulder and the father kept tripping on his son’s heels. “Just go! Just go!” he finally yelled in frustration at his kid, waving his hands like he was shooing away a pesky gull trying to eat his fries. I felt his pain. My kids do that all the time!

When we returned from our hike we noticed we had a new neighbor at the campground and that he had set up his Tailgater satellite TV antennae very close to our space. It was a big ugly geodesic dome thingy on a tall tripod with a long cable running back to his trailer. I went over there to talk to him, after much deliberation on whether or not to do so, and when I didn’t see him out front I ended up staring uncomfortably into the trailer window at his wife standing inside. I heard her yell to her husband in a strong Georgia drawl.

“Honey, there’s somebody outside!”

“Howdy,” said Bob, coming around the other side and offering his hand and being generally way more congenial than I was hoping he’d be. I was going to put him off and tell him to take his antennae and get it the hell off my site! Who needs TV when you’re camping! But he immediately disarmed me with his downhome Georgia manners and charm and, next thing I knew, he was showing me how there was no chance of putting the antennae somewhere else because he couldn’t get a signal anywhere else (he showed me this on an app on his iPhone as he walked around with me in tow pointing it at the sky) and how much he needed his TV to see the big Dawgs came coming on later and suddenly I couldn’t agree more.

“Gotta see them Dawgs!” I said in a Georgia drawl I never knew I had and completely forgetting my original intention of showing him who was boss.

Bob, truth be told, was a great camping neighbor, compared to some others. He’d been in the RV business for 27 years so I could throw all kinds of questions at him about gear and maintenance and what not. He’d been coming to the Smokemont campground for 40 years with his wife and family. That is no joke. He and his wife, when first married, brought a small camper to this very campsite and have been doing so every year since then for the last 40 years. I couldn’t believe that. Don’t you want to camp anywhere else? I thought. But they look at it differently than I do. There is no need to explore for them. It’s about the people and the tradition.

Now, the extended family comes, too. They were camped across the road with Bob’s grandkids running around. Bob had every imaginable camping accessory you could think of, and some. He had spare RV batteries on a DIY rolling cart under his trailer tongue. He had extension cords of all sizes ready in neat coils. Camp chairs of all sizes and shapes. He had an outdoor kitchen setup to put Bobby Flay on the Food Network to shame. I noticed that when Wendy talked to him she was also inclined to add a little Georgia drawl, too. He caught me playing my guitar one morning walking by camp and said, “Well, I didn’t know I was camped next to Carlos Santana!”

He was easily the most eccentric neighbor we had on this journey and when you live in and out of RV parks and campgrounds that is saying something. We noticed his wife one day using the fly swatter on the exterior of the trailer and thought, what the hell is she bothering for outside! Turns out she had experience with the nefarious stink bugs of the region and had learned her lesson. We did not and we spent the rest of the trip, months and months later, finding stink bugs in the camper.

“Daddy!”

“What?”

“There’s another stink bug in my bed.”

The Great Smoky Mountains is a World Heritage Site and rightly so. It’s biodiversity is immediately apparent on even just a short stroll into its forests. The greenery overwhelms. It spills over in a profusion of plant life that is hard to fathom at first glance. Carpets of moss spread along fallen tree trunks and old stone walls. The park has almost as many tree species as you find in all of Europe. It is a forest so well protected and also unscathed by the latest period of glaciation, that it is one of the few places on the planet where you can get a sense of life in the forests before we came along and changed them forever. You do get a sense of grandness on the trails in the Smokies, like you are walking in an ancestral cathedral fashioned not by the hands of men. You can’t help but peer around in wonder and arc your head to take it all in. You really only start to understand the floristic abundance when you look closely. 

We learned that the characteristic ‘smoke’ or blue haze that makes Smoky Mountain vistas so captivating and instantly recognizable actually comes from an organic compound released by the native vegetation. Just another example of how special and unique the area is. It is also especially famous for its robust salamander population (an indicator of a healthy ecosystem) and we were sorry not to find one. I’m certain we just didn’t look hard enough.

October 14, 2023

Leaving the park on the main road back toward Cherokee we took one last look at the majestic elk who, at this time of year, retreat to the valleys to find mates. They seem gentle and peaceful from a distance and they have a stately way of moving and we love them because they remind us of Colorado. The leaves were beginning to change colors but had yet to reach any true oranges, yellows or reds, and instead were so many subtle shades of green that you could never name them all. We knew we were leaving a special place and one along our journey that would leave a lasting impression. 

We turned the rig south and headed toward Brevard and a long awaited layover at a house we had rented there. It would turn out to be a mixed bag of feelings to move out of the camper and live in a house again for a few days.