Back in July Cari came out to visit and we took a trip to Asheville and the Great Smoky Mountains. Asheville is a cool little town, home to some crazy architecture and, the weekend we were there, the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival. Lots of clogging and banjo picking going on, with some pretty good North Carolina BBQ on the side.
Leaving Asheville, we headed up through Cherokee and into the Smokies. This time I actually saw some bears (yes, that is a bear in the photos - they're blurry because some clever American teenager decided to walk right up to it waving her cameraphone until it got a bit peeved, charged at her and then ambled off as she ran screaming in the opposite direction.)
The road through the Smokies brings you into Tennessee, and the delightful town of Gatlinburg. The town is really a road, lined on both sides by motels, glow-in-the-dark underwater themed mini-golf courses, fast food chains and faux olde-worlde restaurants, a Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum, folks dressed as hillbillies serenading tourists with Bluegrass tunes, and countless themed souvenir shops (we visited “Magnet World” and a place that sold nothing but 1950s memorabilia). Although you wouldn’t want to spend more than a night there (unless you’re a certain sort of American family who it turns out come for the week) after a margerita or two in No Way Jose’s Mexican cantina and subsequent late night visit to Ripley’s, it turns into a surprisingly entertaining place.
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