“Hot Breakfast” apparently means the motel possesses an anemic waffle maker, I missed nothing.

Getting to Great Smoky Mountains National Park is far more difficult than I thought.  Why?  The sign into the park is in Cherokee if you enter from the east and my “Languages of Indigenous Peoples” is still squarely tucked in my antilibrary.  Before finding it, I found a sign for a “Ghost Town”, which got me excited as I always wanted ghost town pictures.  I followed the signs and the ghost town was “closed” (?).  I braved through and found out that Ghost Town is apparently the name of an Old West-themed park… which is now shut down, making it ipso facto a ghost town.

The park itself was impressive but with the distinct feeling of “it was once nicer”.  The roadway through the park went through all the nicest views which I attempted to capture.

I have a few really large panos that I won’t be able to process until after I get to a more powerful computer.  Something tells me the laptop will choke if I thrown 137 pictures at it (its limit seems to be about 45).  I got somewhat angry at the route as it became clear that the nicest pictures to be had were along this road.  Late in the evening I took one of the hiking trails which absolutely paled to what one could get gawking from the car.

After three hours of pictures I picked a camping slip, set up my tent, and started editing pictures powered by the ungodly huge battery pack I had brought which provided enough juice to pixel push for four more hours while comfortably inside a dome tent.  The great outdoors.

Other Pictures:

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