This morning we had free breakfast at the Graduate Hotel because of the mixup with their website saying they were serving dinner until ten last night. Here are a couple more photos from the hotel. First, the old-school phone in our room. I have no idea if it worked.
Reggie White! He was a Tennessee Volunteer before he was the soul of the Packers.
Then we hit the road and saw this cool cat on a truck.
We took a detour to check out Seven Islands Bird Sanctuary, and it was so worth it. We took a very long hike out to an island in French Broad River, and then we walked all over the island. According to my birdsong app, we heard Carolina wrens and yellow-rumped warblers, but we mostly just saw robins and a cardinal. It was a perfect, sunny day in the sixties, and we hiked for almost two hours. Here are some photos. There were mountains all around, so it was very scenic.
I do find the name French Broad River a bit rude - why not call it French Lady River? And if you're going to argue that it's a French river that is broad, I would counter that it would then be called Broad French River, because that is how adjectives are ordered in English. This is a very long river that I had never heard of before, because we kept coming across it on our journey today.
Our next stop was Gatlinburg, Tennessee, which everyone says is like the Wisconsin Dells - very touristy. We drove through Pigeon Forge, which did indeed look like the Dells with all the crazy tourist attractions, but Travalon's phone guided us to a place way up in the mountains without much around. We had lunch at a place called Mama's Chicken Kitchen, which was exactly what you'd expect: we had to wait a while for our food, but then it was the best chicken and dumplings, macaroni and cheese, green beans with bacon, and buttermilk biscuit with homemade jam that you could imagine. We were surprised that Gatlinburg wasn't at all touristy... but then we headed down another road, and there was the Gatlinburg we had heard about, all tourist trap places. What a lucky break that Travalon's GPS took us to some random mountain area!
We drove through Great Smoky Mountains National Park, trying to get to Clingman's Dome, and the road was clear but as we got higher there was a lot of snow on the side of the road. The road to Clingman's Dome was closed, but we stopped at a lookout point right on the state line.
The scenery was unbelievably beautiful. Some of the loveliest vistas were in spots where we couldn't stop to take a photo, like this gorgeous creek we kept driving along. But there were stop off points to take photos of the mountains.
This sign was in the men's restroom at the overlook. I didn't see one in the women's restroom. Maybe women know better than to approach elk...?
At the far entrance to the park we saw an elk and some chickens, which were fugitives from a farm museum.
This is the farm museum. We didn't go explore it.
Right outside the park there was a Cherokee reservation. They have their own alphabet; I did stop at one of their many souvenir shops and got a corn bead necklace (sorry, no photo yet), but I didn't see anything with the alphabet on it. However, it was on all the street signs.
As we drove through the mountains of North Carolina, we stopped at a gas station and saw this Catholic church across the way, up on the mountain. It's called St. Margaret of Scotland.
We got to Asheville as twilight was falling and were astounded to see that we were driving along French Broad River. How long is this river?? Asheville seems like a very cool town. We drove along the River District and then went downtown and immediately saw something called the Chocolate Lounge, so we had to stop for truffles (I had a rose pistachio one and an orange tahini one) and chocolate caramel tarts. Parking was free at that hour, so after dessert we went to find some dinner, and right nearby was a Japanese tapas restaurant. Travalon had a tapas dinner of chicken wings, dynamite shrimp, and these crab shrimp balls that were incredible. I had a sushi roll called the Godzilla roll. I'm not sure if it was the spice in the sushi roll or all that chocolate, but after dinner I was so happy that it was like I had taken a happy pill. Downtown they had these random sculptures of turkeys and pigs.
We came to our hotel and swam in the wonderful, warm pool for quite a while. The toilet paper had a little toilet paper bow on it before we used it.
Travalon wanted me to tell my readers that he had said the bar at the Graduate Hotel in Knoxville was named after some famous country singer, but he couldn't think who, so I joked, "He's so famous that I've never heard of him!" He assured me that I had, and then some time later he said, "It's Peyton Manning," who was a football player, and that really made me laugh. As far as I know, Peyton Manning has not started a second career as a country music singer, but I guess you never know.
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