This is what the sky looked like last night when Donna and I came out of Kroger. Even though we had some frozen food items in the trunk we drove around for a while looking for places to stop and take more photos of the orange, purple and black sky. Didn’t find any, and the longer we drove the less exciting the sky became. I guess we had to have been done shopping about 15 minutes earlier…
Here is the best of the 4 pictures I took on Sunday evening of the group in the living room of our cabin. Most everyone else was doing the same thing, camera on timer and running to go get in the shot. The auto white balance didn’t do the correct autoing and it left the photo very orangeish, so I had to tweak it the best I could to make it represent the actual colors.
On the couch from left to right: Donna, her sister Sandy, her sister-in-law Linda and Sandy’s mother-in-law Dottie.
The women standing left to right: Donna & Sandy’s cousins Beth and Margret.
The men standing left to right: Sandy’s husband Paul, Margret’s husband John, Beth’s husband Jim, yours truly and Donna & Sandy’s brother Jim.
Click on the photo to get a larger version. Then click Full Size at the bottom of that page to get the ginormous version.
No trip to Deal’s Gap is complete without a souvenir. At fist your only option was a sticker from the Crossroads of Time a gas station/motorcycle campground where NC28 joined US129, the “official” starting point of the 11 mile trip.
As word of the very curvy stretch with no entries spread, attendance at the Tail of the Dragon grew. Now they have expanded the store to accommodate all manner of stickers, t-shirts, videos, mugs, etc. and to go along with the campground they have added a small motel for motorcyclists. Then a lot of other places jumped on the bandwagon and started selling Dragon merchandise too.
Nowadays there is another option for a memento from your trip through the Gap, just like most thrill rides at amusement parks, you can now purchase a photo of yourself & vehicle “slaying the dragon.” It all started back in 2001 with a fellow called Killboy, when he would go out on weekends and snap photos of the traffic, then he would sell a high resolution copy to you off the internet.
There is obviously money to be made at this endeavor, because where there was once just one, there are now at least three. On our drive through yesterday, which occurred on a random weekday in the middle of September, we passed by 4 tents set up at various pullouts on the road manned by photographers. Two were from the same outfit, US 129 Photos, which is where the above photo was cribbed from. Killboy & 129 Slayer haven’t uploaded their photos yet.
Depending on what the other’s photos look like I may buy an image of the Purple Whale driving the Gap. And I may even buy one of the 300C that was right behind me that was loaded with the Canadian Cousins.
Brother Jim had promised his wife Linda a tour of the Biltmore House, so they left early to be able to take in that attraction before catching a plane back to Houston. Ninety-six year old Dottie made it known that she wanted to see Gatlinburg before they left on Tuesday morning, so Sandy, Paul and she did that today. That left Donna and I to entertain (or more accurately, be entertained by) the Canadian Cousins, Margret & John and Beth & Jim.
We talked them into a trip south to Clingmans Dome, over into Cherokee, NC before heading west and looping back into Tennessee along US129. 😉 Actually both men had heard of the Dragon’s Tail and were interested in driving it.
It was early enough in the morning that the trip through downtown Gatlinburg was easy, but as soon as we hit US441 in the Smokey Mountains National Park we ran into a couple of sections of road work, complete with one lane closed and flagman waits. The road to the top of Clingmans Dome was pretty, but we weren’t sure what we would see at the top because the fog/clouds were pretty thick in spots on the 7 mile road to the tower at the top of highest peak in Tennessee. And at the parking lot looking south into North Carolina, sure enough it was like an ocean of white with a few islands of blue mountain peaks sticking up. We still opted to take the 1/2 mile walk uphill (seriously up hill) to the circular ramp to the top of the 54 foot high tower for a 360 degree view. It was so worth it. NC was still a sea of white, but back north to TN you could a perfect example of how these mountains got their name (the above photo.)
On the way back down the mountain we had two delays, one short, for grazing black bear cub and one long, for a road crew trimming trees (that wasn’t there on the way up.) And as we were leaving the park in NC we had one more slow down, as there were cars pulled off to both sides of road to watch an elk grazing in a field. The 50 mile trip from Gatlinburg to Cherokee had taken us 3 hours and it was nearly lunch, but instead of trying to pick a spot in the tourist town to eat, Donna and I suggested we travel 10 more miles to Bryson City.
If you ever find yourself in Bryson City at lunchtime you can’t do better than The Iron Skillet. The six of us opted for the lunch special of meat loaf, mashed potatoes, green beans, cole slaw and a roll for just $6.95. Mmmmm.
The first ten miles of NC28 north of US 19/74 is 4 lane divided, but the last 20 miles is two lanes of awesome windy black top along the Little Tennessee River that is my favorite in the state. About 2/3rds into that span the call comes up on the FRS from the Canadian Cousins behind us in their Chrysler 300C, “So, is this the Gap?” “Nope,” I reply, “Not yet, but in short while we’ll stop at the beginning point for a quick break.” At the Crossroads of Time we were 2 of the 4 cars in the lot, the rest of the 40-50 vehicles there were motorcycles.
The gap run was fun in spurts as I followed some fellow on a cool looking chopper, but he couldn’t go very fast through any of the 318 turns because of how low it sat to the ground. I did what I could by slowing to a near stop until the Chrysler 300C caught up, before racing ahead to catch back up to the chopper. When we stopped at the dam overlook, John told he probably could have kept pace better if not for the two women in the back who were not having as much fun on the roller coaster road as he and Jim were in the front. I don’t doubt it for a bit, as John is a member of the Canadian Mounted Police and had spent quite a few years as a motor patrolman, so I bet he probably could coax a quick run through the Dragon out of that rear-wheel V8.
We finished up the 180 mile day by driving the Foothills Parkway to Townsend, TN for a gas stop, following US321 through Mega Tourist City, Pigeon Forge to Gatlinburg and the cabin.
This is the view from the balcony of the cabin rented by Donna’s sister, her husband and his mother. They are staying a little further down the road closer into Gatlinburg in Lora’s Cabin in a different “resort.” The view from where we are staying is not half bad either, as long as you are looking up and can ignore the the row of similar cabins in our little subdivision. Our cabin is a little larger and a lot more modern, but where Sandy, Paul and Dottie are staying there is a much better “cabin in the woods” feel.
We are in a cabin outside Gatlinburg, TN tonight, sharing the place with Donna’s oldest brother and his wife. We are here because we are visiting with some cousins of Donna & Jim from Canada who are in the area while on their vacation. Because we passed right by, at about the right time, we had to have lunch at our favorite place in Hendersonville, West First. They had the whole of downtown Hendersonville, NC blocked off for a classic car show, so we had to walk a little extra bit to get to the restaurant. But that was no real inconvenience because there was plenty of cool old automotive iron to see, but only one was pixel worthy, this spiritual successor to the Miata, a 1965 Lotus Elan.
The Sonata passed the six thousand mile mark somewhere between Gatlinburg and the White Oak Lodge & Resort
This morning the temps were in the low 70’s and it wasn’t supposed to get much warmer, so we opted to drive the Miata to work. It didn’t get any warmer, it actually seemed to get colder as the day wore on and at each walk around the parking lot on our breaks today, if we closed our eyes, we could have believed we were back in the northwest US (and we weren’t complaining at all.)