Morning to Midnight —The Smokey Mountains

I recently made a trip to the Smokey Mountains. For those of you who don’t know, that’s way down south from where we are. 

A two-week trip and 2,500 miles:

Blue skies

Green trees 

Fresh air 

It's strange, but having grown up in the city, I really came to love the countryside. The quiet roads and clear skies. My dream is to live in the quiet countryside one day.

And did you know I'm a Time Traveler in the future? And I was told that living in the country is working out pretty good for me in the future :p

Anyway, we get viewers from all over the world. From Asia, Europe, South American and North America, so for those who haven't experienced it yet,

Let's Time Travel together.

Oh and by the way, its a two-week trip, so we'll condense into just one day, from

Morning to Midnight

What better way is there to start a fresh morning than with a hike on the nice, paved, smooth roads, oh yeah, and with trees and all the other green stuff.

We'll start it at the Plott Balsam Overlook at 5,020 feet. It's marked as mile 457.9 of the 469 miles that the Blue Ridge Parkway stretches, so technically in North Carolina.

And yeah, it's the Blue Ridge Parkway, the one you're thinking of.

"Take Me Home Country Roads"

- John Denver 1971

Don't know it? Learn it and love it.

One of the things that I love about going to the countryside is the open space and being able to look out, seeing practically as far as your eyes can reach. In this case, the miles of overlapping mountains and the clouds instead of towering buildings.

This is a waterfall we found while we were following around the map. The cell service wasn't the greatest so we went back to old-fashioned paper map. This shot took a few tries, but I was able to climb through the bridge, jumping between the rocks and trunks to get to the center. It was a really strange hike to find this location, but it was worth it.

When I came back from my trip, everyone asked me if I saw any animals in the woods. Through the trip we found a few families of black bears(!), wild boar, wild turkeys (!!) white-tailed deer and a few elks. And I gotta tell you, this city boy was most excited to see turkeys. I don't think I'd ever seen a live turkey, and I never knew they were so majestic. Anyway I guessed you would be most excited to see some bear cubs. Apparently there are some 1,500 black Bears within the Smokey Mountains and we got to see six of them. Not too bad, huh? They were shy so we didn't want to get too close.

Let's take a quick detour to a place known as the Craighead Caverns, better known as the Lost Sea. Basically it's a series of underground caves, where a room filled with water was found in 1905. The lake room is 800 feet long and 220 feet wide, but here's the problem. Even though people tried to explore the caves further down, even after finding several large rooms filled with water, they never reached the ends of the cave and still haven't found out where the water is coming from. Oh, did I mention that giant rainbow trout living in the water turned white because they don't get sunlight?

Now if you look carefully, this picture is actually upside down. What you see at the top is the reflection of the cave's ceiling.

The sun is getting real low, and the bears have gone into, wherever it is that they go when the sun gets low? The wind is picking up, and the clouds are rolling home as well. At one point during the trip, we were high enough that we passed the point where the clouds were hanging. When we looked down from the overlook, all that we could see below were thick clouds, the top side of clouds that you normally wouldn't see.

Now this is the part that I personally was the most excited about. Seeing the stars at night. For this, we had to leave the hotel late, after the sun had set and all the light had faded away. Taking the curving road up the mountains wasn't the easiest since there weren't any light that shone on the road, but we managed our way up until we found a spot that had an opening wide enough through the tree-line.

In the beginning, the darkness was so thick, you couldn't see the person next to you. But have you ever stared into the Distant sky, where the stars are pouring down from the night sky? It is absolutely mesmerizing. There is nothing that I love more than just siting and watching the stars and letting them pour over you. City-boy (me) never gets to see this many stars, and the pictures I took don't even begin to capture the real beauty of these stars.

(If you're are interested in seeing more pictures related to this trip, please visit the Distant gallery. Most of the works there are related to this trip. Click on the link to go directly. jmtimetravel.com/distant )

We ended up lying down on the grass wonderstruck, and around us there were thousands of fireflies, lighting up the woods like the stars in the sky. We later found out that the week of our visit, was the beginning of the firefly-mating period, which explains why there were so many of them.

This entire trip turned out to be like a breath of fresh air, clearing my mind.

Looking back at these photographs still brings a smile for the good summer memories along with the lyrics:

Country roads, take me home

To the place I belong

West Virginia

Mountain mamma, take me home

Country roads