Tennessee New Year

Friday, 6 January 2012

For New Years i went to Tennessee with Karrie and her family. Karrie's family stayed in hotels but we stayed in a cabin about 10 miles outside of Gatlinburg.

Here is the cabin that Karrie and i stayed in. It was really nice and at the same price as a hotel.
I took lots of pictures of the night sky from the back deck.
This is picture was done by using the CHDK software i've used before, it combines around 60 pictures into one. Still not perfect, but i'm getting better. The town of Gatlinburg is on the left.
This is the time lapse video from those pictures. Using my new camera makes a big difference. The Canon S95 lets in a lot more light.

Here are some more pictures i took the next night.


The morning of the second day Karrie and i drove into the Smokey Mountain National Park and hiked on the Laural Falls Trail. It was 2.6 miles round trip and had a rise of 300 feet in elevation.




The falls were really cool and we even climbed off the trail to a rocky area below. That's Karrie way down at the bottom.

I was excited to try my homemade ND filter. The pictures didn't come out perfect, i forgot to take the picture in RAW, it made it a lot harder to fix the colors in Photoshop.

We left the falls after an hour or so, but before leaving the park we stopped at a trail along a river. I tried taking more ND filter pictures.







The next day we went to Ober. There is a road but we took the cable car.
Then went all the way to the top of the mountain on a chair lift.



The view was great.


They had a neat picture up there that explained what you were seeing.
It's a little hard to see but it labeled each peak. For example #6 is Clingmans Dome at 6643 feet.
Here is the view of downtown Gatlinburg from the steps of the aquarium.
We spent an hour there one day.
Got to pet some horseshoe crabs.


Another day we went to Wonderworks. It was a really cool upside-down building in Pigeon Forge. This was a cool 3D painting they had inside. You can't tell how it works until you get near it and realize that it isn't flat.

Gatlinburg at night. The traffic was still pretty busy.
New Years in Gatlinburg. They dropped the ball and shot off fireworks from the space needle.

Elvis and his family were even there.

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3 weeks in West Virginia

Sunday, 17 January 2010

Work called and i left for West Virginia, for a 3 week trip, on December 27th. So for the 2nd year in a row i was working out of town on New Years. Luckily during the time i was down there, West Virginia was having unseasonably cold weather, with lots of snow. And i found out that down there when it snows 3" school is usually canceled. But as always it was lots of walking, around 100 miles, and during that time i saw lots of cool stuff. I really enjoyed the mountain views, they were everywhere and looked great covered in snow.

Here's what i looked like most days, trying to stay warm.
I also learned that there are TONS of deer in that state. In fact West Virginia has led the US in number of car/deer accidents; Michigan is number 2. They were everywhere and unlike Michigan where they could walk around in farm fields, it was either stand in the road or on the side of the mountain.

Not lots of farms or cattle but there was the occasional cow with an itchy nose.

Measuring out the line
After a couple of weeks in the Super 8, my clothes pile did get a bit messy.

A cold early morning

Apparently where people in this town paid for water. No it was not a double wide.

Instead of burying pipes like gas lines they sometimes just laid them on the ground. Here's their hi-tech solution to crossing a river. Screwing a wire to 2 trees.

Scary land owner that definitely had lots of guns. And had no problems telling the DNR how things were gonna work.

The coolest guy in West Virginia.

And of course he lived on...

Incase you can't read it, the hand painted sign says "Neurosurgical Assoc" on "Knawl Creek Rd" I'm not joking this place was out in the middle of nowhere. If you hadn't already guessed, Knawl Creek road isn't a major highway. It isn't even paved, its gravel. I didn't want to even think about what kind of equipment they used to use in their redneck neurosurgery that got performed in that place before it collapsed.

"Honey my central nervous system's still hurtin' me" "Well time to go down to that neuro-something-or-other down on Knawl Creek"

Typical road names were either "lick", "hole" or "hallow" (pronounced "haller") It took me about 4 months to realize what people were talking about when giving directions and said "ya ya'll want to turn left down at the second haller off a Mud Lick road"

This was a burned down house. But after offering a big reward like that i'm thinking any day now they'll have their suspect. You could have bought the house for around $400.

Fresh bear tracks crossing the road we were walking. We guessed they couldn't have been more then 3 or 4 hours old since it just snowed that morning. That's my boot print next to it, just to give a sense of their size.

Straightforward sign

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