Pictures 13: Tennessee abandoned house

Okay, let's throw this in reverse a little bit; this actually happened before West Virginia did. When I was still in Knoxville, Patrick showed me this abandoned building by a train track, almost totally hidden by ivy.

Click any image to see the larger version on Photobucket.


From the outside


Aaaand from the inside

5 more images after the jump

a quickie. and road food.

Yes, it has been about a week since I posted here, but I have been pretty nondescript; been hanging out at home in NJ, sleeping in and going to bed early, driving around North Jersey, visiting family and seeing a friend or two. Nothing to blog home about.

Now I am in Tennessee again. Patrick and I have tickets to see Neil Young tonight at the Knoxville Civic Auditorium. We've spent the last two nights camping in Maryville. It was weird to camp in a normal campground as opposed to a national park/forest like we have before - there were, like, people there. And RVs. And right across the lake were houses. Like, that people live in. Weird.

We've been talking a lot about future plans, whether we will end up traveling together after all, where we will be in the next few weeks - but, since nothing is solid as of now, I'm not going to go musing on about it. Once we figure things out I will update you all considerably.

On a final note, my new favorite road food is Subway. This may sound weird coming from a girl from New Jersey, where real submarine sandwiches are king. But I've found, in my travels from NM to TN to NJ and back to TN, that Subways are just as plentiful as McDonalds on the interstates, and honestly, when you're hungry, they aren't half bad. The downsides are that there's no drive-thru and you have to actually go inside to order it, and they aren't easy to eat while driving (unlike, say, a double quarter-pounder), so it makes you lose time automatically. But the upside? They have real live vegetables on them, they don't make you feel totally disgusting, and for less money, you can feel considerably less gross and eat just as much as you would at some fast-food place.

Don't get me wrong. I will always, always choose my hometown Chatham Sandwich Shop over freakin' Subway any day. But when I'm rolling down 40 or 81 or 78 or any other road that you can refer to simply by spitting out two digits, I'm all about the tuna salad sub on Italian herbs and cheese bread with lettuce, onions, tomatoes, green peppers, cucumbers, and mayhaps some light mayo if I'm feeling frisky.

the laws of harmony

After leaving Patrick at the decidedly un-romantic location of Waffle House, I headed down through Pigeon Forge and the Smokies to get to the beginning of the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Edit: See photos related to this part of this entry here (Pictures 9: Blue Ridge Parkway Landscapes).

I’d wanted to be able to say I’d driven the whole BRP. It’s only 469 miles, so I was like – psh, no bigs. But drive that thing and you start to understand why it’s a bit of an accomplishment to have driven it, never mind hiked it. Especially the first stretch, which is through the Cherokee Indian Reservation and Nantahala National Forest, and it is windy as HELL. Not windy like blowing, windy like switchbacks. Windey?

My first stop for my dorky little passport stamp was the Waterrock Knob Visitors Center, where they had a board updating travelers on the conditions on the BRP. I saw that the road was closed from Elk Pasture Gap to the Carolina Arboretum, a distance of about 10 miles starting about 65 miles into the highway. I didn’t write down precisely why it was closed, but nearby there were a ton of trees blown down, so I’m assuming the road was blocked. I went as far as I could on the highway, but soon found that it was getting hazy due to some incoming storm systems, and since I didn’t even start driving the Parkway til nearly 3 pm, it would be getting dark soon – and I didn’t see much of a point of driving the BRP in the dark.

So at around 5 pm, I took the exit near Elk Pasture Gap, which is NC route 151 – an incredibly windy/windey road down through the hills all the way to 19/23, then to I-40. I got on 40 again and was pretty disappointed to be back on a boring old interstate, but I made do. I was supposed to take I-40 to 77 to 81, and as I neared Statesville, I took note of the 77 south exit. And then…. for some unknown reason… I didn’t take the 77 north exit. I spaced out, I was thinking about something else, I have no idea – I just didn’t take it.

I whipped out the atlas quickly while driving (yeah, I’m skilled), and saw that if I stayed on 40, it would hook up with Highway 64 west, which would connect to NC 901 north, which would eventually bring me diagonally northwest to 77. So 64 it was.

The drive through the small North Carolina towns was beautiful. Really and truly beautiful. People say these kinds of towns don’t exist any more, and who knows, maybe they just appear close-knit and comfortable and full of people whose families have lived in those mountains for generations. But if it was a façade, it sure had me fooled.

As I was going up 901, I came across a rodeo in a small arena just off the road. I first drove past it, then turned around and doubled back. A seriously sweet woman in a purple leather fringed Western shirt, who was taking admission, said it was $6 to get in, and there was an ATM back where 901 met 64, about four miles back the way I came. I told her I would be right back.

So I went to the gas station with the ATM. I asked the woman behind the counter, “Where’s y’alls ATM at?” – yes, New Jersey friends, I seriously talk like that now, apparently.

She said, “Right over here. But it don’t got no money.”

I guess I made a really disappointed face, because she burst out laughing and told me she was kidding – “Nah, sweetie, it’s got money. I think. Try it!”

It did indeed have money in it. I took my cash booty back to the rodeo and paid the woman $6.

“Park your car over here next to this barn, ‘cause I know you’ll wanna leave your dog in there. I can watch it and make sure no one messes with it,” she said. Seriously, why aren’t people in the rest of the world this nice?

When I pulled my car in next to the barn, I heard a THUNK under my tire. Fack! I must have run over a rock, I thought. I cracked the windows and told Blake to be good and went to the arena.

Edit: See photos related to this part of this entry here (Pictures 11: Youth Rodeo in Harmony, North Carolina).

I got there at about 7:30, and the rodeo wasn’t set to start til 8 pm. When I arrived, the crowd’s attention was on a preacher who was sitting on the rodeo gates with all the contestants lined up at the fence behind him and the spectators sitting on the bleachers in front of him. He was talking about sin and virtue – and honestly, that’s all I can remember. He kind of babbled on and on and on, as preachers are wont to do. I was busy taking pictures of the horses.

After he was done preaching, he asked for prayer requests – first off was Jordan’s mother, who has cancer. Next was a request from a teenage boy on the bleachers to pray for Matt, who works at the Circle K (people on the bleachers nodded – “Yes, I know Matt”) – who was in a car accident and will not be leaving for the Marines next month because he has six broken ribs, a punctured lung and brain damage. A little boy on a horse at the far end of the rodeo rider line raised his hand and asked to pray for the families who were hurt by the tornadoes in Kansas City, and to pray for “our rodeo family.” Heads nodded.

Ay-men.

The preacher wrapped it up and the riders got to warming up their horses. Some walked in circles, some galloped back and forth with quick turns (they must have been the barrel racers), others cantered figure eights.

I became suddenly very jealous of the girls riding their horses in the ring. This was the Tri State Youth Rodeo Association, and all its contestants were between ages 3 and 18. So these girls were in high school, with their tiny waists and blow-dried hair and their horses whose manes the girls braided that day to prepare for the rodeo. Crocheted crosses hung from the horses’ martingales. One little girl sat in the saddle cross-legged, comfortably as if she were on a classroom floor. Three girls walked their horses abreast and laughed and gossiped and reached across saddles to swat each other on the arm at a particularly sassy comment. What I wouldn’t have given in high school to have been in their place – to have a horse of my own, girlfriends who had their own horses, friends with whom to ride on weekends.

The sun was on its way to setting when the rodeo finally began. After the flag ceremony, a boy rode a bronco for “a little over a second” (he later came and stood near me on the fence with his family – “it was more than a second, gosh”), and then it was mutton butsin’.

I’ll tell you, either the North Carolina sheep are calmer than New Mexico sheep, or the mutton busters are WAY better on the East Coast. The kids had to be able to ride the sheep for at least four seconds, and probably six out of twelve made it that far. Some of the kids fell over to the side of the sheep and rode along the sand with their head on the ground and their feet wrapped around the sheep’s ribs, one leg under and one leg over. After all the little kids were done, some of the older little kids rode calves.

At this point, the sky, which was glowing cobalt, was really threatening to the West. The announcer declared that they weren’t calling the rodeo off, but they were simply pressing pause until the storm blew over.

It was nearing 9 pm by this point, and I wanted to get to Virginia to sleep (Harmony is approximately 50 miles from the Virginia border), so I thought I’d cut out even though the rodeo wasn’t over. I went back to my car and thanked the woman in purple again for watching my car. She said thank you for coming, and urged me to come by again and come to another rodeo – they hold them about once a month. She gave me a brochure and wrote her e-mail address on it so I could get a schedule. And the weird thing is, I kind of wouldn’t mind going to another one, and if I’m in the area again when a rodeo is scheduled, I might make a point to go. It was just that nice.

So I climbed in my car, started her up, pulled out of the parking lot, and… Okay, what’s that? Something’s not right. At all.

I pulled back into the parking lot and checked on my tires. Yup – the front right tire is shot to shit. That “rock” I ran over was actually a hunk of 4x4 in the tall grass.

My fancy tires have their own 24-hour roadside assistance, so I called the service and relatively uneventfully was able to get a tow truck sent my way.

After a few minutes, I received a call from George Cardin, who runs a 24-hour emergency roadside service in the Statesville area. He said that a big rain was coming, and he was going to drive toward me, but if it started to rain hard, he would stop and then start driving again once it passed. “And I’m not talkin’ spittin, now,” he said, “I’m talking like you get outta the car and you look like you had a shower.” I said it was totally fine, and that I’d just wait. The sky was starting to drip in Harmony.

I sat in the car and waited, and soon people began flowing out of the arena and getting into their cars and driving off. The rodeo had been called off after all. I stayed put in my car while pickups flowed out of the lot around me, and soon, Cardin showed up.

At first it seemed like he was pretty irritated to be there. I wasn’t sure what I was doing – I had never had to deal with my spare tire in my trunk (my car is a 2002 Ford Focus, and the tire was still in the well with all the original Styrofoam around it), and when I didn’t know how to turn on my back dome light and didn’t know that there was a screw in the middle of the tire holding it in place, that was not what Cardin wanted to deal with. Blake was barking at him through my car window and my car was too low for the jack to fit under it and I couldn’t get my spare out on my own and he seemed pretty exasperated with the whole situation.

“I just wanna get you out of here and get me out of the rain,” he said gruffly.

“I wanted to sleep in Virginia tonight. I don’t want to be here either,” I replied.

I guess he realized that we were in the same shitty, leaky boat, so he softened up after that.

The rain let up a little bit, and Cardin did too.

“Let me guess: You’re gonna want a cheap hotel that takes you and the dog.”

“Yeah, I thought I’d find a place on 77,” I replied.

“You want to stay at one of them tourist hotels, or you want a good deal?” he asked.

“I want a good deal.”

“Okay. You follow me. We’re going back to Statesville.”

I followed him through the rain, which was coming down again, and we headed back to Statesville. He called me again and again on my cell phone as he arranged a hotel for me and asked me how I would like my tire to be fixed. He offered to call a friend and have him open up his tire shop to get me in and out with a new tire so I could be back on the road that same night, or he could get me that cheap hotel room and arrange to have my tire replaced the next morning. I chose the latter.

I followed him to the Masters Inn in Statesville. He’d had his wife call ahead to get me a good deal, and sure enough, I got a bargain on a room for me and Blake. The woman behind the counter was sweet, and at the end, she said, “Do me a favor – take these and read them.” She handed me Awake, the Jehovah’s Witnesses publication. Will-do, I said.

At this point, it was raining. And I’m not talking spittin. It was pouring. But of course the trunk of my car was all disheveled because I’d had to dig through it to find my spare, so I had to bring a whole bunch of bags into the hotel room to reorganize them. Sure enough, by the time I had all five or seven or however many bags in the room that I needed, I actually had to wrap my hair in a towel, it was so wet.

Once I got into the room, life was generally uneventful. I wrote my last blog post, I organized my stuff, I took the band-aid off my toe and snapped some really gnarly pictures.

Edit: See photos related to this part of this entry here (Woe is Toe).

All I could do all day yesterday was smile. Even this morning, when it turned out that even my spare was flat, all I could do was smile. Even when some chick started screaming obscenities at 8:30 am and, consequently, some dude in a doo-rag smashed a bottle of malt liquor outside my hotel room door and two cop cars later showed up, it was all I could do but smile.

I’m not worried. I’m not stressed. I have good karma. I have a good life. Traveling is great. I am in this sultry weather, I have the best dog in the world, my new tire was put on my car in less than a half hour and I was able to go take pictures of piles and piles of honeysuckle growing behind the Statesville Walmart.

Today was fine – uneventful, all things considered. I drove another chunk of so miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway, explored an abandoned house along the way, and tonight I write this from a hotel room in Hagerstown, Maryland. Tomorrow I will be home.

Edit: See photos related to this part of this entry here (Pictures 10: Abandoned House on the Blue Ridge Parkway).

Tomorrow I will be home, and I’ll spend a little while there before heading back down to Knoxville to see Neil Young with Patrick. Then I will spend more time at home. I will think. I will think a lot. I’ll figure things out. But first, I have to get home.

she's leaving home

I'm presently sitting in a hotel room in Statesville, North Carolina with a broken toe and a flat tire and rodeo dust all over me and my camera. But that comes later.

Last night Patrick took me to downtown Knoxville. We drove down by the University of Tennessee, where all the college students hang out, then went downtown to Gay Street and Market Square. The neighborhood was great. It wasn't big, but it was bright and crowded (on a Thursday night) and sultry and humid and beautiful. Everyone wanted to stop and talk to Blake and the parks were all full of grass. (I guess that last thing isn't so unusual, but after living in the desert for six years, you would freak out too.)

I saw a lot of stuff I wish I'd had my camera to take pictures of, but naturally I left it in the car because it was humid and I was (am) a little sunburned from Bristol, so carrying things by straps was bound to be uncomfortable. But I'll be back in Knoxville soon enough - I got Patrick and me tickets to see Neil Young on May 27. I'll do everything then.

I miss cities. I miss that musty dirty city smell that comes out from under cars and up between the cracks in the sidewalk. I miss being with someone you love in a city. There are few better things than being awash in this sea of people but knowing there's one person there who only cares about you, who only wants to be with you, and for whom all these extra people are just that - extra.

I've tried to keep the puke-worthy adolescent babblings to a minimum here because I'm an adult and adults don't do that kind of thing. But seriously, whatever. Later that night, back at the hotel room we got so that we'd both be well-rested (him for a job interview, me for the drive out), he looked right at me and said, "I want you here." And I knew I wanted to be there. I don't want to leave Madrid, I love Santa Fe, I love New Mexico, but I need to be where he is.

I know that's terribly un-feminazi of me. But there's nothing wrong with love, and admitting you're in love, and believing in love to the exclusion of anything adverse to love. I have always been the type to leap and to trust that the net will appear; and my life, the way I have lived my life, so far has provided those nets. Whether it was moving to New Mexico at age 18 or adopting a death-row dog when I had no idea how I'd be able to afford or keep a dog or whether it was quitting my job and subletting my house and falling head-over-heels for someone with a ten-ton anchor in Knoxville, Tennessee, I just do things and think about the consequences later.

But you know what? It has always worked out. I have always been blessed. I came to love Santa Fe, that same troublesome little dog is currently curled up next to me on these slithery hotel sheets, and I know that I will find a way to be with Patrick and that I will be happy however I do it... Because that is just how my life goes.

All night we left our computers to download stuff, and I finally uploaded all my blog entries. The joys of internet are such that when I have them, they're great, but when I am without them, I breathe just as easy. I figure - everyone who knows me well enough to know what I would consider an emergency has my phone number.

So after a great night's sleep, Patrick and I packed our own things into our own cars (we'd combined some stuff in my car to go camping and got rid of my superfluous stuff in his car, which we left in Strawberry Plains). All was well until I was rushing around, trying to put things in their proper place, and I didn't see the big concrete curb. Or maybe I did, and decided to give it a big healthy kick with my flip-flopped foot.

Holy shit. You know how, when you stub your toe really hard, you feel like you're gonna puke? That was me. Oh man. It hurt so fucking bad. I could hardly breathe. My whole leg was full of stabbing pains. But we had a lot of crap to do, so I slapped a band-aid on it and kept going. For the record, my toe is now all kinds of pretty purple and red colors, and is quite shiny to boot. I'm thinking it's broken. I've had broken toes and this looks like it.

Edit: See photos related to this part of this entry here (Woe is Toe).

The hotel was right next to a Waffle House, and, in case you didn't know, I freaking love Waffle House. So we went to Waffle House. I got us brunch and did really great, even though I knew I would be leaving after we ate.

Everything fell apart once I got outside. Leaving... Leaving sucks. So much. But I don't know how to not do it. I left New Jersey at 18, I left New Jersey again and again until I finally left at age 20 and knew it wasn't the same kind of home as it used to be. And I felt the same way leaving Santa Fe this time; not like I wanted to stay after all, because I'd made it impossible to back out of my plans - so instead that feeling which would otherwise be wishy-washy just translated to an intense, dull sadness - not a cut, but a bruise, a seeping just under the skin.

And this morning I found myself leaving Knoxville. I know I'm going back in less than two weeks (more on that later), but leaving... ugh. Leaving. I hate leaving. I especially hate leaving a person. And this morning I was leaving Patrick again.

But I knew I needed to get home. I knew I needed to get back to New Jersey. I need to go home.

I want to write about everything else that happened today - the Blue Ridge Parkway, the wrong turn, the Christian family rodeo, the flat tire, and how I'm now in a hotel run by Jehovah's Witnesses in Statesville, North Carolina - but I need to sleep. Letterman is telling me to sleep. Sleep.

More tomorrow.

Ouch, my toe.

contemplating my next move

Patrick and his dad are fishing back in the woods, and I’m sitting at the dead-end of River Bend Road in Bristol. There’s a house here that has an unsecured wireless network. And I didn’t connect! Just don’t feel like it. How’s that for weird?

I fancy myself a pretty adaptable person. When I moved to New Mexico at age 18, I was miserable for a few years until I found the right niche and found my footing in the community, but I made it. Now it may be time for me to leave Santa Fe, and I wonder if I will adapt to wherever I go next.

Patrick has not outright asked me to move to Knoxville, but when I offered to do so, he didn’t object. It certainly is different from Santa Fe – and I may like it better, in a weird way. People here don’t seem as self-absorbed as they are in Santa Fe. People move slower but they do know how to move fast – they just choose not to. In Santa Fe, when people move slow, it’s because they have no idea how to function like a normal human being. City Different, indeed.

But I do love Santa Fe. I do love Madrid. I love the art and the landscape and the creative people and the through-and-through acceptance of just about everyone.

That would be my main fear moving out here. I don’t just lean to the left – I’m pretty much running in that direction. And obviously, people here are not that way. I have heard good things about Knoxville as a metropolitan area, as far as being hip and tolerant is concerned, but I’m not holding my breath. Could I live in the South? Could I handle it?

There is only one way to find out. That’s the bottom line here; there is only one way to find out and if I don’t find out I will always wonder.

Cades Cove

I ended that last entry kind of in the middle of nowhere because I fell asleep. Being jobless now, I stay awake like I mean it and sleep whenever I want to. It’s a good life – I never have to pretend to be awake and with it when I’m not. If I want to lay down, I do. You can’t do that when you’re a 9-to-5’er.

After Pat, JD and Emily got back from the Chimneytops hike, we went back to the campsite, packed up, traded the kids off to Pat’s ex-wife in town, then Patrick and I went back to the campsite. By that time it was getting late, so we turned in around 9 pm. Naturally, turning in early didn’t ensure we got an early start, so we crawled out of bed around 9 am and by 10 am we were back on the Cades Cove Loop, checking out the other historic sites along the way.

Edit: See photos related to this part of this entry here (Pictures 3: Great Smoky Mountains National Park Settlements).

Since it was a Monday morning, we’d have thought it would be quiet, but there were a surprising number of cars on the loop – not to mention approximately one trillion kids on a school field trip at the Cable Mill. But we made the best of it – I could often wait until people had moved out of the way to take pictures.

When we stopped at the John Oliver Place, there was a volunteer ranger there to tell some of the history of the building and some of the park lore. When John Oliver, his wife, and their infant daughter moved into the cove in late November in about 1820, they would have starved to death had nearby Indian tribes not left them five bags of food (the ranger said it was three bags of dried pumpkin, a bag of chestnuts and a bag of corn – not sure who thought to record that fact, but it’s pretty cool that they apparently did, and that that much food was enough to sustain a family of three through a Smokies winter).

He also told the story of the only Civil War-related killing in the Cove. This part of Tennessee was sympathetic with the North, since they did not have any large plantations and no real need for slaves. The Rebel troops, however, would often come into the valley and steal livestock from the inhabitants. The townsfolk of Cades Cove devised an early warning system where the girls of the town would go into the woods and watch for Rebels, and when they saw them, they would signal each other via animal calls and get word back to town so that the farmers could hide their livestock. When the Rebels found out who devised this plan – a Reverend – they killed him. (There’s some Southern hospitality for you.) The Reverend’s gravestone, which is in the graveyard at the Primitive Baptist Church, notes that he was killed by Rebels.

Patrick and I drove around the Cove, exploring the old houses and taking some great pictures. We’ve decided to go find an old farmhouse, fix it up, get some horses and live happily ever after. (Not to mention hot in the summer and cold in the winter ever after.)

Once we finished at the Cove, we headed into town to bring Patrick’s car to his daughter Chrystine. We were headed to Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest in North Carolina, part of Nantahala National Forest, and we only needed one car. After passing his car off to Chrystine in Kodak, we hit the road.

By this point it was already about 4 pm, and it was starting to get cloudy and rainy. We took the Cherohala Skyway into North Carolina, and the fog actually made for some gorgeous pictures, as opposed to the flat light a beautiful day would have provided.

Edit: See photos related to this part of this entry here (Pictures 4: The Cherohala Skyway).

It was late by the time we arrived at Snowbird, a campground Patrick often goes to. We went to the very last campsite down a long dirt road, known as the Junction, probably because on the left side of the road is a spring that flows into a river on the right side of the road.

We set up camp in the dark and crawled into the tent shortly before it started pouring. Between the heavy rushing river to one side, the waterfalls of the stream to the other and the rain all around us on the tent, it was the kind of night’s sleep you only experience a few times in your life.

Like I said to Pat that night – “I wish I could just press Pause and stay here for a really, really long time.”

best-laid plans

When I told my co-worker Rani about my situation, she smiled and said, “What is that saying? ‘If you want God to laugh at you, make plans’?”

I’ve been saying that for over a week now as a form of comfort, or explanation, or excusal, for what happened.

Backing up a bit, the basic fact is that my trip, as I knew it, is canceled. I was going to make the drive with Patrick, the man who inspired me to do all this in the first place. But on April 27, about two weeks before we were to leave, he had to leave New Mexico attend to a family situation in Tennessee, which would keep him in the Knoxville area probably indefinitely. I was either going to make the trip by myself, or not make it at all.

My first thought was to call it off all together. I can’t do this alone, I thought. More importantly, I don’t want to do it alone. I figured I would just head straight home to New Jersey and convalesce at my parents’ house in Morris County.

But then a few days went by and Patrick and I spoke and we decided I should go to Knoxville. If he has to stay in Knoxville, and if we decide to try to make our relationship work, I may look into moving to the area, so I figured I should at least get a feel of the place before I commit or don’t commit.

So here I am. I am presently in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, sitting at the trailhead of the Chimneytops trail, hanging out in Patrick’s car while he and two of his kids hike. No dogs are allowed on the trails, so rather than leave my dog alone in the car for four hours, I decided to stick around here and get some writing done and sort out my brain.

One thing I can say is, this park is as busy as Six Flags on Memorial Day Weekend. It’s the most-visited national park in the nation (10 million people each year), and on a cool May weekend like this, I believe it. Cars are everywhere. You creep down roads at a crawl. Last night we drove the Cades Cove Loop, which is about 11 miles, in 2 hours or more. Sure, we got out to explore on occasion, but we spent most of our time rolling along slowly behind a line of cars or waiting in a traffic jam where a bunch of idiots were getting out of their vehicles to get a picture of the bear just off in the woods.

Edit: See photos related to this part of this entry here (Pictures 2: Great Smoky Mountains National Park Landscapes).

But none of that takes away from the sheer beauty of the Smokies. Living in Santa Fe for six years and spending the majority of that time amidst juniper and pinon trees, scrubby sage and chamisa plants and harsh desert landscapes (beautiful as they may be), I was totally unprepared for the sight of Cades Cove in early summer. The trees are so green, they glow. Some roads are so covered by foliage that it’s hard to tell what time of day it is. (Driving to the Sugarlands Visitors Center today, Patrick said, “I think it’s nice out today.” I looked up and realized – yeah, it’s hard to tell with all these trees in the way.)

The Smokies aren’t just a forest, like I thought they would be. Cades Cove, where we are camping, in 1900 had a population of 700 people – about 125 families. So sprinkled throughout the valley are graveyards, old houses, primitive churches, rustic barns and cabins. The Cades Cove Loop took us past a few churches, some of which we stopped to photograph, and a walk into a sprawling meadow brought us to a tiny graveyard (maybe a dozen graves) with no other buildings even remotely nearby. Some park rangers say that some of the churches were moved from their original location, and these random graveyards in the middle of nowhere would lead me to believe that’s true.

Edit: See photos related to this part of this entry here (Pictures 3: Great Smoky Mountains National Park Settlements).

I have had a ball taking pictures with my new camera. A few days before I left, I bought my friend Jason’s old Canon Rebel XT. It is heaven. I have been wanting a camera like this since I was a kid (seriously, at nine or ten years old, I was asking my dad for what I called a “manual camera”), and it’s just the greatest. I’ll crouch down by a fence and take pictures focused on the landscape, then focused on the barbed wire. It just doesn’t get old.

On the way out I stopped a few times to take pictures – in Newkirk, New Mexico, Clinton, Oklahoma, Okemah, Oklahoma (Woody Guthrie’s birthplace), and Jackson, Tennessee. There may have been a few other towns in there. Newkirk and Clinton were my favorites. I have always been mesmerized by abandoned buildings, so many of my pictures are of old edifices I stumbled upon (there certainly are enough of them on the High Plains). Now here I am, and I got some great shots of graveyards and churches yesterday.

Edit: See photos related to this part of this entry here (Pictures 1: New Mexico to Tennessee).

I thought driving by myself was going to suck. I was prepared to stop often to rest. But it was actually great. There was no one to tell me to hurry up, no one to complain “But you just peed 50 miles ago!”, no one to say I was taking too long photographing some old broken-down stand at the Casey Jones village. Traveling by myself (well, with the dog) is actually quite glorious.

But one of the reasons I enjoyed traveling, albeit by myself, was because I knew I was moving toward Patrick. When he left New Mexico two Tuesdays ago, I was devastated. I knew I loved him, but I thought I would be able to let him go if I had to. I learned this week that that is probably not true. Being with him again is perfect. This isn’t going to be easy – especially if he decides to stay in Knoxville (judging from the number of McCain stickers and the pickup I saw with ‘Way To Go Arizona’ soaped on the back window, I don’t think I will fit in very well here) – but I am willing to try to make it work. Whether that means dealing with something long-distance or moving to Knoxville or Asheville is yet to be seen.

When it comes down to it, I doubt Patrick will want to leave Knoxville again, as much as he loved living in New Mexico. To see him with his daughter Emily is like watching a bell ring. Emily just turned 3 years old in March, and between loving camping, wanting to go fishing and being game for anything outdoors-related, they are a match made in heaven.

We’re presently out here in the Smokies with Emily and JD, Pat’s son, who is 15. Pat had wanted to (and I suppose still wants to) hike the Continental Divide Trail with JD, but staying in Knoxville would make that difficult.

All told, the kids are great. I mean, sure, the less-than-24-hours I have spent with them is just that – less than 24 hours – but I’ve had a great time. I could see spending an extended amount of time with them, and, if Pat has his way, living with JD.