September 30, 2005. Crossing the Mississippi and heading into Memphis, TN.

So I finally got another week off. Technically I'm still on vacation until Monday. We left on Thursday, September 29th and headed for Tennessee. Spent Thursday night in Little Rock and Friday night in Nashville. We walking around the Grand Ole Opry at night. A very nice place. There were about 15 people singing there that night; I knew one of them. There's also a huge mall next to the Grand Ole Opry, so we walked through parts of it and called it a night. We drove down to Pigeon Forge on Friday. In case you don't know, Pigeon Forge is the home of Dolly World. The traffic was incredible. Cars were backed up at every light for at least half-a-mile. Not withstanding that point, traffic was still moving pretty good. Anyway, we had booked one of those take-a-tour things and get a free stay, so we stayed at Pigeon Forge for two nights. All in all it's pretty gaudy. Gatlinburg is right down the road, maybe five miles, and it's equally gaudy. We went to one show and saw several impersonators; Elvis, Conway Twitty, Buddy Holly, Tom Jones and someone who's name eludes me at the moment. They were all pretty good. Lots of things to do and see in Pigeon Forge. With the exception of the 90 minute tour taking almost 4 hours, our stay was pretty nice. We drove through the Great Smoky Mountain Nation Park on Monday. The views were incredible. If you have never been there, you should make a point to go. We ended up at Amicalola Falls in northern Georgia that evening. Amicalola is where the approach trail to the Appalachian Trail begins. We hiked up to the top of the falls and took the stairs down. While the hike up was pretty nice, going down 425 steps and then another 175 steps was less fun. We stayed the night at the lodge in Amicalola Park. It's a really nice place, but at $110 per night, it's a bit pricey. On Wednesday we drove about 40 miles north to Neels Gap and the Walasi-Yi Inn. On our hike last spring we had gone around Blood Mountain instead of over it. So we needed to officially get those 2.5 miles of the AT. To do so, we had to hike about 6.8 miles. I had heard that Blood Mountain was really hard. It was a walk in the park. The switchbacks made it pretty easy. On the way up we met John. John is about 35 years old and was hiking for a week. We chatted for a while and found out that he had a kidney removed in May due to a cancerous tumor. He said that statistically his odds weren't good, so he wanted to enjoy life. We all hiked up together, but John fell behind pretty quickly. At the top we stopped and had lunch on the rocks. By that time John had caught up to us, so we all rested a while and then started off together going down. So we're just walking along and a man comes around a bend in the trail and says "hello." I said hello too. It was then that I noticed that he was totally naked. He had a walking stick. We were all so stunned that we just walked past him. Some how, I just wasn't expecting to see a naked man that day. Had I been witty, I might have said "Gee that looks like a penis only smaller" or something like that. John was carrying a recorder for his hiking journal and he made an entry right then asking us to vouch for the event as he thought his wife might not believe him. Fortunately, the rest of our hike was uneventful. We spent Tuesday night in Dawson (or Dawsonville) which is about 20 miles from Amicalola Falls. On Wednesday we drove all through northern Georgia going to where the AT crosses at Unicoi Gap and Dicks Creek Gap and then to Dahlonega, Georgia. Dahlonega is where the first US gold rush began in the 1830's. It's a nice town and caters to tourist. From there we headed home. Other than being run off the road by an idiot on I-20 the rest of our trip was uneventful.