Brown Adventures: June 2, 2021 Towards the Smokeys We Go

June 2, 2021

My humans groom themselves by standing over a hole, and putting water in their paws and splashing it on their muzzles. The water falls in the hole. Water comes out of a finger and drips in the hole so that I can drink it. I do that when my humans are grooming. Sometimes, they make the water stop, and I will stand there and stare till they make the water come again.

Woke up to a cloudy morning. Because we are in the westernmost part of the eastern time zone, at 6 am, it is still dark, with only a hint of light. As it lightens, it is just a tiny bit rainy. I put on my rain poncho for my walk, and Spouse came along for a while. They are adding about 25 spaces to this RV park. It is quite nice and woodsy. The spaces are a decent size and they have fire rings. Too bad they only had room for us for one night, but alas, we will move on.

First stop: Camping World. It is right on our way on the east side of Chattanooga. Chattanooga is really quite pretty. The Tennessee river snakes through with rock precipices rising above. I hesitate to call them mountains. Lookout Mountain is the highest point around and it is only 1300 feet, but in this part of the world, that is tall! Camping World here is interesting. The parking lot is in Tennessee, but the store is in Georgia.

When we were pulling into Camping World, we saw a Bass Pro Shop. Oh, that will be afterwards. I don’t know why, but for the 10 second drive, Spouse put it into Lady Gagarmin. I said just turn left out of here then turn right on that street. She said to turn right… in fairness to her, she thought we had already turned left, but SPOUSE – even though I told him not to, turned right. Why he can’t use his eyes, or maybe even listen to me… is beyond me. So we made a 10 second ride a 10 minute ride. Well, we got what we came for in the end!

North on I75 to Hwy 64 east. It’s a scenic drive with trees, and lakes, and rivers and then streams with rocks. It is lightly raining but people don’t seem to care. Convertible tops are down and people are picnicking at the tables they have occasionally on the road. There are kudzu curtains hanging from rocky cliffs and tall trees. I betcha this is incredible in the fall.

We wind our way into North Carolina, past the town of Murphy . If there is one, there are a million raft outfitters. It seems that humans seem to think that if one works well, let’s just keep adding more until we spoil it for everyone. There are rafts all over the shores. If it were a sunny day, I bet we would not be able to see the water through all the rafts floating down river. We ended up settling at an RV park in Whittier, right at the base of Smokey Mountain National Park.

We have been told not to even consider towing a rig in the park. We are at Timberlake RV Park. How we came to this… In looking at the Good Sam catalog from Camping World which lists RV parks and campgrounds, this boasted large sites and Wi-FI. It is about 3 miles off the beaten path on a small road where we felt we needed to suck in our stomachs if another car came by on the road. The sites are quite large, and we have a stream flowing behind us. We needed 4 blocks to level Hannah and we could have used 5! Spouse stacked some blocks under the stair so it would be more firm. Why pay a gazillion dollars on fancy stairs when you can do it the hillbilly way, right?