– Memphis, Tennessee to Asheville, North Carolina –

Today was a very long day. We ended up trying to do a bit more than we should’ve in a single day, and it kept us going from 6am until after 10pm. The time changed, too, which didn’t help. We got up and went for a run in Memphis, which has a pretty awesome park with lots of trails called the Shelby Farms Conservancy Park. We took the Chickasaw Trail, which was paved and quite shady. We had an excellent run, and the park was less than 5 miles from our hotel. If we liked running on sidewalks, we probably could’ve just run over to the park. Mark wouldn’t have liked it, though. That’s a little further than he likes to go.

We were back at our hotel by 7:45, and showered and had breakfast by 8:30. With some La Quinta biscuits and gravy in our tummies, we were ready to go, and we were on the road by 9am. We’ve been reading The Mallorean on this trip, and since our version has three books in one volume, I’m finding it pretty difficult to hold up for long periods of time. It’s awkward to try to find things to prop a book up on while you are sitting in a car. Maybe I’m working on the muscles in my wrists? I don’t know. What I do know is that I’ve figured out some very inventive ways to get my knee up into the seat with me to hold the book up for me. I am a car-yoga master.

Not much happened between Memphis and Nashville, where we stopped at another Whole Foods for our lunch. As we realized we were coming up to Nashville around lunch time, we decided that we’d really enjoyed last night’s dinner. In fact, we had enjoyed it so much that we thought it would be fun to have something like it again. All Whole Foods have a somewhat different food bar, and this one was pretty spectacular. Mark says it has been his favorite Whole Foods meal ever. He wants me to specifically mention that they had chicken-fried tofu, which he thought was out of this world.

It was pretty warm in Nashville, so we couldn’t leave Ripley alone in the car for long. We made up our plates and headed back out to the parking garage to eat our plates on the go. The Nashville Whole Foods is very close to downtown, and the streets around it are packed with businesses and people. Before we saw the parking garage, I wasn’t sure how we were even going to get into it. Luckily, the people who built the thing had thought of that, too, and we were fine.

It was at this point that we made a ridiculous decision. We decided that this trip would be a trip full of Whole Foods meals. We checked our map, and planned to stop at Whole Foods for dinner in Asheville on Day 3, for dinner in Nashville on Day 4, and for lunch in Little Rock on Day 5. We aren’t crazy, I swear. We’re just a little odd sometimes. At least we are eating healthy? No Taco Bell meals for us.

We barely stopped at all between Nashville and the Smokies, and we didn’t take any pictures. By the time we’d had lunch, we realized that we still had a lot left to do in our day, and we weren’t progressing as fast as we should be if we wanted to fit everything into our day. It was after 5pm (with the time change) when we made it to the national park. We took a few windy little roads in, which was quite fun. It was sprinkling a bit, so we’d started to worry the weather wasn’t going to hold for our visit to Clingmans Dome, the highest point in Tennessee.

Our first stop in the park was the sign, where we took a delightful family photo. Ripley really gets a kick out of standing on the signs with ledges. I think we have done it four or five times now, and she’s always fascinated by the smells on and around the signs. It’s a lot of fun to pop her up there, as well. I know because it is usually my idea. Luckily she doesn’t seem to have my fear of heights.

The road we took into the park runs along the Little River, which is actually an average-sized river if you’re from Texas, like us. It’s amazing to see such massive rivers out in this part of the country. I was telling Mark today that when I was a kid and reading Huckleberry Finn for the first time (I was probably 7 years old), I didn’t understand how they could move such big boats down something as small as a river. Later on, when I’d traveled a bit more, I figured it out. Most of the rivers in Texas are pretty puny.

The Smoky Mountains are pretty, and the forests are impressively large, I must say. I can’t tell you that it is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been, because that isn’t true, but it is a place worth preserving. Did you know that Great Smoky Mountains is the most visited US National Park? It seems unreal to me, but because a major highway runs through, more than ten million people visit annually. That’s twice as many people as the Grand Canyon sees every year. Impressive, no? And to top it off, Great Smoky Mountains is free to visit. It’s pretty neat.

The Appalachian Trail runs through the Smoky Mountains, and I’ve been regaled with many a tale from Mark’s adventures on the AT with his father and brother in this area during the course of this trip. Mark seems pretty excited to be back, and I can tell that he’s been enjoying pointing out places that he remembers and things that he’s seen.

It’s a slow drive through the national park when you aren’t on the highway. We didn’t drive through that way. We took another road off to the west a bit that goes through the park. The road meanders through the mountains, and you almost never see the sun for the canopy of trees eclipsing the road.

Sugarlands Visitor Center stands just down from the Tennessee entrance to the park, and we stopped there to get a map and a stamp in our National Park Passport book. We were lucky it stayed open until 7:30, because it was around 6:15 when we finally made it. We looked around, bought Mark a T-shirt and Ana a postcard, and then moved on. The park ranger at the visitor center told us that the long walkway up to Clingmans Dome was open 24 hours, although the visitor center there had closed at 6pm. We didn’t mind at all, since we already had our stamp. It was getting late, but the sun was still shining, and the rain had cleared.

The drive to Clingmans Dome through the park is about 20 miles, and it takes a while to make it that far when the roads are anything but straight. Still, we made it to the base of the walkway around 7, which wasn’t terrible. We got Ripley out of the car and stretched our legs for a few minutes, then checked the sign about the trail to the top. It said that dogs were not allowed on the trails, despite the fact that the park ranger had told us that dogs were allowed on all of the paved trails.

We were miffed, to be sure. There is absolutely no reason to exclude dogs. The trail is about a half mile at a very steep incline, and it is quite wide and smooth. We saw several cars with dogs waiting inside, but since the weather was nice and almost cold, it wasn’t hurting them. Still, I felt bad for little Ripley. She looked very dejected when we had to put her back in the car. She can make puppy eyes sad enough to break your heart.

As I said, the trail is pretty steep, and it is hilarious watching people trying to make their way up it. I was really surprised to see so many people making the climb in sandals and flip flops. I mean, yes, it is paved, but it is hardly something you should do in flat shoes with no support. That’s how you mess up your feet. Go to national parks in sneakers at least, people!

The Appalachian Trail crosses the trail up to Clingmans Dome, and Mark grabbed a picture of the sign a trail blaze. We didn’t see any through hikers going by, but I imagine that most of them were already setting up camp for the night. It was rather late, after all. We did see a strange pair of girls wrapped in sleeping bags sitting next to a parked car that didn’t really seem like it belongs so far up a mountain. I guess someone must’ve driven the vehicle up there when the trail was empty. It is wide enough for a vehicle, but I’m not sure why you’d want to take one up there in the first place. There’s nowhere to go. I don’t know what those girls were doing there, either. They never moved, as far as we could tell.

At the top of the trail is an observation tower. Mark has visited the tower before, but he doesn’t have any photos of his last visit. Apparently the mountain was blanketed in fog at the time, and they couldn’t see anything, anyway. We were afraid that would happen today, but by the time we made it up there, the sky was clear and the rain had ended. Only little puffs of fog remained out among the mountains, and they only added to the view. You can really see why they call them the Smoky Mountains from up there.

We hurried back down to Ripley when we were done, and we made our way out of the park. We still hadn’t had dinner yet, so we stopped in the town of Cherokee, where we ended up getting Subway. Cherokee is a little casino town that’s on the area’s Indian reservation, and it is absolutely full of hotels. We wished we were stopping there, since it was already about 8:15, but alas, that wasn’t the case. We still had another hour and forty-five minutes to our hotel in Asheville.

Our arrival in Asheville was a bit late for us, and all of the people in line in front of us at our hotel were being turned away because the place is booked solid. Apparently Asheville is very popular on the weekends. The hotel rates are very high, as well. In any event, we made it, and tomorrow we are heading back up into Tennessee for the day to hike to a waterfall on another portion of the Appalachian Trail. We’ll be back in Asheville again tomorrow night. It should be a much shorter day!

– Trip Total : 1,055 miles –