Joey D
Premium
- 47,207
- Boyne Falls, MI
- GTP_Joey
- GTP Joey
I've been trying to plan a trip to the Dragon for probably 5 or 6 years now, maybe longer, but every time I'm ready to go something comes up that prevents me from going. Back in the middle of June while sitting around drinking beer, my buddies and I began to plan a 5 day trip down south to slay the Dragon. I finally knew I was going to get there after wanting to do it for so long.
The week came and I had been making preparations for my car and body to take what was going to be one epic road trip. Then I received a call 6 days before I was going to set off which delivered some awful news, my grandpa had passed away after an 8 year bout with Alzheimer's. Then 2 days later my grandma was rushed to the ER for an emergency appendectomy. I decided that I should postpone my trip in order to help my family, there was always next year.
Tuesday night came, 2 day before I was to set off, and my mom came into my room and told that I was going on my trip no ifs, ands, or buts. My grandpa and I used to take insanely long road trips when I was younger for 2 weeks every summer (like 4,000-5,000 miles total) and my mom said that he would have wanted me to go. My grandma called me from the hospital too and told me that I needed to honor my grandpa's memory by taking this trip for him. After some protest I finally gave in and realized I was about to do this, but with a new purpose.
Thursday
I loaded up the car and on Thursday morning at about 4am I backed out of the garage for a 620 mile drive. I tied a fake red poppy that the American Legion sells as a fund raiser to my sun visor as well since my grandpa used to love selling them. It was going to be my memento during the trip.
Before I get into the drive and complaining about how awful everything in Ohio is, I'll give an overview of the Dragon. It's Highway 129 through the Smokey Mountains on the boarded of Tennessee and North Carolina. It's in an unincorporated community known as Deal's Gap which has then only motorcycle resort I've ever seen. The Dragon is an 11-mile stretch of road that contains anywhere from 311-318 curves depending on who you ask and is a pretty demanding road of yourself and your vehicle.
Now on to the drive. I didn't take any pictures in Ohio because well it's Ohio and there's nothing interesting besides some really flat land, cows, Ohio Highway Patrol and construction. It does however have Waffle House's and Skyline Chili's, so there is a little bit of a redeeming factor. Here's the Brent Spence Bridge which offered me salvation from Ohio and welcomed me to the far more interesting state of Kentucky.
It didn't take long before I started entering the mountains. Now I should point out I'm from Michigan where we got bulldozed during the Ice Age so mountains are something I hardly ever seen.
I flew through Kentucky, mostly because I don't think the state believes in speed limits or having police of any kind on the expressway. It was a nice change of pace from Ohio that was for sure. Before I knew it was entering Tennessee where the was NASCAR...NASCAR everywhere!
Before I knew it I was on 129 and heading towards the cabin which was on Hwy 28. I didn't really know I had hit the Dragon until it suddenly became really, really, really curvy and a sport bike behind me thought he should pass me on the high side on a blind corner. And I suppose this is a good time to point out that I have a new hatred for motorcyclist because as far as I can tell their brains fall out when they get on 129 and they think they own the road. People on bicycles were worse though, I've always hated people on bicycles that rode them on main roads but I really, really hate you when you ride in the middle of the road on a blind corner doing 5mph in a 30mph zone. It's like anyone on two wheels had a death wish.
But anyway, after driving the 45 minutes into Robbinsville, which is the first "big" town you come to on 129. It was the opposite direction of where the cabin was but it was the closest place I could get any form of mobile phone reception. After cursing that I drove the complete opposite direction I set off towards them cabin and called my buddies who'd drove down the night before to go to the Mammoth Caves. It was already 4PM and I knew it was at least a 5 hour drive to where I was. My buddy's girlfriend also had the key to the cabin with her so I couldn't even get in. But I called them and my buddy told me not to worry because it was only 3 in the afternoon and they'd be there by 830. I then had to remind the idiots I call my friends that the Mammoth Caves are in the Central Time Zone and not EST. With an "Oh 🤬" they took off at great speed towards my location.
I set off to find the cabin which was about an hour from Robbinsville and over two mountains. I'd never been in the mountain before so the drive was fairly unique. 12-16% grades weren't uncommon and nor was semi trucks passing me at 90mph as they let it run out down the hills. But I eventually made it to the road the cabin was on and started down it. It was 5 miles of blind switchbacks and some fairly epic grades too, it was a blast.
I finally did arrive at the cabin by the way of some backwoods BBQ joint and getting lost in a place call Bryson City. The sun was going down by the time I reached the cabin so these picture are from the next morning when everyone got them. My buddies also did finally show up around 930 and fairly scared out of their wits by having to traverse the Dragon and Hwy 28 in the pitchblack.
Also none of us could make it up the driveway since we all were rocking summer tires that had zero grip on soft gravel. We figured the cars would be just fine all bunch up at the bottom
Friday
I was up early Friday morning and ready to go and tackle the Dragon and get on with my reason for being here and so was my buddy Jasper (he'll be in the silver Neon), but the other two guys and the one girl weren't too excited about being up at 730 to go driving. We eventually rallyed the troops and set off around 900.
The first stop was Fontana Dam just because it was cool and I like seeing dam things (see what I did there?).
We ended up at the bottom of the dam to so we could take some dam pictures of the cars and look at the dam power station.
I also managed to step in an ant hill or something and my foot got brutally attacked!
We left the dam and headed towards Deals Gap's Motorcycle Resort and got ready to slay the dragon.
The Tree of Shame, where we really didn't want to end up.
And here we are, all lined up and ready to go.
And they "slayers" (from left to right: myself, Jasper (silver Neon), Jimmy and Kim (black 3-series) and Mike (red CTS).
We did the Dragon a few times and then a storm rolled in which sort of put a damper on out plans, I still need to go through Killboy and find the pictures since I couldn't really take pics and drive at the same time.
Our goal now was to reach Clingman's Dome, the third highest peak in the Appalachians and the highest in the Smokies. This took us down some parkway (although not the Blue Ridge Parkway, which was on tap for Saturday). This was the first time I really got to see anything in the way of vistas and I was pretty awe struck.
We also ended up in Gatlinburg at some point too, which was horrible and I never want to go back. It was trashy, full of some rather large people with tattoos and few teeth, and had an art gallery with a painting of Barack Obama punching George Washington (if it hadn't been $300 I'd probably bought it for its hilarity). I did buy some moonshine though (ok I bought a lot of moonshine).
After driving for what seemed like hours and getting caught in one of the worst storms I've ever been in, as well as eating some of the best BBQ I've ever had. We made it to Clingman's Dome hoping to see 7 states or whatever it was they claimed from the peak.
For the first time I understood why they were called the Smokies.
My buddies also thought they'd climb some rocks, which a park ranger didn't see all that happy about but she let it go on the condition I didn't let them die, although it appears they almost did.
And for the record is was really cold up there too, it was probably 80-85 with 98% humidity in the lower elevations but it was 58 with a stiff breeze at 6,000 feet. We pawed through out cars in the search of something warm. Here's Jimmy demonstrating how BMW owners should look if they were either Canadian or Mountain Men.
I also bought a hat
After we'd thrown everything we had in the cars on us we began to climb the ADA approved path to the summit which said was only a half mile away.
Now I've never been in a wheelchair for any real length of time so I'm not sure how hard it is, but I do understand physics and if anyone thinks that gravity would allow anyone to take a wheelchair up a 15%+ grade needs to probably reconsider a few things.
On the way up though I got to hike the entire width of the Appalachian Trail, which I figured is just as good as hiking the entire length. In PUMA driving shoes never-the-less!
We finally made it to the summit after quite the climb and us all discovering we were woefully out of shape, but it couldn't be that easy. We were then greeted with some Soviet looking spiral structure that would provide the "stellar" view.
Ya so I about died of exhaustion for this!
After that we drove about three hours back to the cabin in a pounding thunderstorm, but we did get BBQ at a hole in the wall joint (actually I think it was a trailer). We got back to the cabin and sat around and drank an unhealthy amount of Yuengling Amber Lager, as well as Black and Tan.
Saturday
Saturday everyone wanted to make breakfast and screw around some more instead of driving. But we finally set off around 9 for a trip down the Blue Ridge Parkway to Mount Mitchell, the tallest peak in the Appalachians and supposed to offer one of the best views around. We also sought out another BBQ place (are you sensing a trend yet?).
The Blue Ridge Parkway was awesome and I have no idea what Top Gear thought was so bad about it, 45mph was plenty fast on some of those corners. The only downfall were people on bicycles who thought they should wear all white and ride in the middle of the road when there was 0 viability. I accidentally ran two bicyclist off the road too when I came around an uphill corner at 30mph and they were in the oncoming lane heading right at me. They were fine and didn't even fall off their bikes but I thought the one guy wanted to kill me. His female partner tore him a new one though so I just calmly made like a tree.
Anyway....here's the Blue Ridge Parkway.
First turn off:
Jasper thought he should climb about 30 feet up the cliff so he could yell at Harley riders...which he did for about 20 minutes.
At the highest point of the road.
We then took a break from the road so we could head to the BBQ joint which involved an hour ride down off the parkway to some little hick town. Now let me just say the hospitality at any southern restaurant is amazing and a vast majority of the waitresses are smoking hot. I'm normally not a huge tipper, although I do give a fair amount, but when some hot girl in tight jeans and t-shirt calls me hon and sweetie while bring me mountains of pig covered in sauce and sweet tea in a Mason jar, I have a tendency to tip well...very well. I really wish people in the north were that friendly at restaurants, or really just that friendly in general. Besides the bikers who were pretty much all from New York everyone was fantastically nice and acted like they were your best friend...and you believed them.
Even the cops were nice. We were filling up in the little hick town after stuffing ourselves full of pork, coleslaw and hushpuppies when two cops came up and started talking to us. They told us where a speed trap was up the road because we all looked like "friendly yankee boys". They shook our hands and told us to stay out of trouble and raced out of the gas station, if I didn't know any better I would have thought them Duke boys would have raced by too.
But back on the road we stopped at Looking Glass Falls, which was really pretty from a far but a complete hell hole close up. Every nasty person in the area and beyond were swimming around at the bottom of the falls. It smelled heavily of smoke, sweat and garbage. I was saddened but snapped picture of it anyways.
Back on the Parkway we continued to climb through the mountains while the weather got worse.
The last picture was what probably an hour of our drive was like and where I had the run in with the inconsiderate biker (who I assume was from New York because no one in the south was that much of an asshat).
But we made it to Mount Mitchell and continued to climb onwards and upwards. We were met with an outstanding view though!
Our cars were even being obscured by the thick fog (and that's the highest my car has ever been!)
So we drove back down the mountains and headed towards Asheville, which was much bigger than I thought it was going to be. We met up with Mike, who hadn't joined us for the trip along the Parkway for whatever reason and him, along with Jimmy and Kim, said they were tired and were going to head to the cabin. Jasper and I thought we should drive the two hours to the Dragon because why not? We also wanted to do what others were telling us was called the Moonshine run. We'd drive 129 to 441 (or something) to 28 into Bryson City all in the dark, so we set off and drove a really long ways via some little BBQ stand
We ended up at Deal's Gap sometime later and met up with a Mazda3 club, they were all pretty cool guys and we all exchanged lies about our conquest of the mountain roads. One guy was pretty hardcore though, he had a completely stripped out Mazdaspeed3 that he drove from Georgia in. He told us it was one of the most uncomfortable trips ever but totally worth it in the end.
Domo Kun was also along for the ride.
It was still probably an hour or two before sunset so Jasper and I shot some pictures of each others cars rounding the bends.
After we screwed around with that for a while we took off once again for Deal's Gap so we could top off the tanks and finish the Moonshine Run. About a mile from the start/finish for the Dragon we were flagged down by some Nissan guys who told us there was a bad accident up a head, so we took off to see if they needed any help. We arrived on the scene to see a very smashed Integra and an equally wrecked Protege. Apparently a guy on a Harley clipped the yellow line and side swiped the Integra who spun into the side of the mountain and clipped the Protege coming the other way. Apparently someone had to lock the Harley rider in their truck so the two car guys didn't kill him. They were both from way up in the Northeast and now their cars were toast because some Harley rider had to ride above their skill level. We took off when the cops came since we knew it'd be under control and there was nothing we could do.
We did see this sticker which was very fitting to say the least.
We did the Moonshine Run though and it was about the most thrilling experience in an automobile I've ever done since it started to pour while we were racing down the side of a mountain, it made it slightly sketchy. But it was a blast, I even had Bluegrass cranked on the radio to set the mood even more. We made it back to the cabin at some late hour by the way of a Burger King, which had bacon on every sandwich and something called a bacon sundae (bacon and ice cream) which proved to me there was a God.
Sunday
I drove for 13 hours and my mind went numb. The I hit Ohio and I zoned out for 4 hours since I had to do 65mph the whole way. I did get Skyline Chili though which tore up my stomach for the rest of the drive
I got home and promptly passed out on my bed since I had to be up in 8 hours for a 10 hour day of being on my feet at work.
It was totally worth it though and I can't wait to go back. I'd never really been around the south and they aren't nearly as backwards as I thought they'd be and they were way friendlier than I'd expected. The scenery was stunning, the food was amazing, the roads were out of this world and I could listen to country music without being looked at funny. Also everything was much cheaper, from the cost of fuel to the cost of groceries. I've ever started looking at what jobs might be down there because I really wouldn't mind living in Kentucky, Tennessee or North Carolina (just not the deep, deep south). So all you southerns, keep doing whatever it is you guys do (worship NASCAR I'd wager) because you really showed a northerner than it isn't all Dueling Banjos and making one another squeal like piggies.
TL;DR I went to the south, drove a lot of roads, ate a lot of BBQ and feel in love with the area.
The week came and I had been making preparations for my car and body to take what was going to be one epic road trip. Then I received a call 6 days before I was going to set off which delivered some awful news, my grandpa had passed away after an 8 year bout with Alzheimer's. Then 2 days later my grandma was rushed to the ER for an emergency appendectomy. I decided that I should postpone my trip in order to help my family, there was always next year.
Tuesday night came, 2 day before I was to set off, and my mom came into my room and told that I was going on my trip no ifs, ands, or buts. My grandpa and I used to take insanely long road trips when I was younger for 2 weeks every summer (like 4,000-5,000 miles total) and my mom said that he would have wanted me to go. My grandma called me from the hospital too and told me that I needed to honor my grandpa's memory by taking this trip for him. After some protest I finally gave in and realized I was about to do this, but with a new purpose.
Thursday
I loaded up the car and on Thursday morning at about 4am I backed out of the garage for a 620 mile drive. I tied a fake red poppy that the American Legion sells as a fund raiser to my sun visor as well since my grandpa used to love selling them. It was going to be my memento during the trip.
Before I get into the drive and complaining about how awful everything in Ohio is, I'll give an overview of the Dragon. It's Highway 129 through the Smokey Mountains on the boarded of Tennessee and North Carolina. It's in an unincorporated community known as Deal's Gap which has then only motorcycle resort I've ever seen. The Dragon is an 11-mile stretch of road that contains anywhere from 311-318 curves depending on who you ask and is a pretty demanding road of yourself and your vehicle.
Now on to the drive. I didn't take any pictures in Ohio because well it's Ohio and there's nothing interesting besides some really flat land, cows, Ohio Highway Patrol and construction. It does however have Waffle House's and Skyline Chili's, so there is a little bit of a redeeming factor. Here's the Brent Spence Bridge which offered me salvation from Ohio and welcomed me to the far more interesting state of Kentucky.
It didn't take long before I started entering the mountains. Now I should point out I'm from Michigan where we got bulldozed during the Ice Age so mountains are something I hardly ever seen.
I flew through Kentucky, mostly because I don't think the state believes in speed limits or having police of any kind on the expressway. It was a nice change of pace from Ohio that was for sure. Before I knew it was entering Tennessee where the was NASCAR...NASCAR everywhere!
Before I knew it I was on 129 and heading towards the cabin which was on Hwy 28. I didn't really know I had hit the Dragon until it suddenly became really, really, really curvy and a sport bike behind me thought he should pass me on the high side on a blind corner. And I suppose this is a good time to point out that I have a new hatred for motorcyclist because as far as I can tell their brains fall out when they get on 129 and they think they own the road. People on bicycles were worse though, I've always hated people on bicycles that rode them on main roads but I really, really hate you when you ride in the middle of the road on a blind corner doing 5mph in a 30mph zone. It's like anyone on two wheels had a death wish.
But anyway, after driving the 45 minutes into Robbinsville, which is the first "big" town you come to on 129. It was the opposite direction of where the cabin was but it was the closest place I could get any form of mobile phone reception. After cursing that I drove the complete opposite direction I set off towards them cabin and called my buddies who'd drove down the night before to go to the Mammoth Caves. It was already 4PM and I knew it was at least a 5 hour drive to where I was. My buddy's girlfriend also had the key to the cabin with her so I couldn't even get in. But I called them and my buddy told me not to worry because it was only 3 in the afternoon and they'd be there by 830. I then had to remind the idiots I call my friends that the Mammoth Caves are in the Central Time Zone and not EST. With an "Oh 🤬" they took off at great speed towards my location.
I set off to find the cabin which was about an hour from Robbinsville and over two mountains. I'd never been in the mountain before so the drive was fairly unique. 12-16% grades weren't uncommon and nor was semi trucks passing me at 90mph as they let it run out down the hills. But I eventually made it to the road the cabin was on and started down it. It was 5 miles of blind switchbacks and some fairly epic grades too, it was a blast.
I finally did arrive at the cabin by the way of some backwoods BBQ joint and getting lost in a place call Bryson City. The sun was going down by the time I reached the cabin so these picture are from the next morning when everyone got them. My buddies also did finally show up around 930 and fairly scared out of their wits by having to traverse the Dragon and Hwy 28 in the pitchblack.
Also none of us could make it up the driveway since we all were rocking summer tires that had zero grip on soft gravel. We figured the cars would be just fine all bunch up at the bottom
Friday
I was up early Friday morning and ready to go and tackle the Dragon and get on with my reason for being here and so was my buddy Jasper (he'll be in the silver Neon), but the other two guys and the one girl weren't too excited about being up at 730 to go driving. We eventually rallyed the troops and set off around 900.
The first stop was Fontana Dam just because it was cool and I like seeing dam things (see what I did there?).
We ended up at the bottom of the dam to so we could take some dam pictures of the cars and look at the dam power station.
I also managed to step in an ant hill or something and my foot got brutally attacked!
We left the dam and headed towards Deals Gap's Motorcycle Resort and got ready to slay the dragon.
The Tree of Shame, where we really didn't want to end up.
And here we are, all lined up and ready to go.
And they "slayers" (from left to right: myself, Jasper (silver Neon), Jimmy and Kim (black 3-series) and Mike (red CTS).
We did the Dragon a few times and then a storm rolled in which sort of put a damper on out plans, I still need to go through Killboy and find the pictures since I couldn't really take pics and drive at the same time.
Our goal now was to reach Clingman's Dome, the third highest peak in the Appalachians and the highest in the Smokies. This took us down some parkway (although not the Blue Ridge Parkway, which was on tap for Saturday). This was the first time I really got to see anything in the way of vistas and I was pretty awe struck.
We also ended up in Gatlinburg at some point too, which was horrible and I never want to go back. It was trashy, full of some rather large people with tattoos and few teeth, and had an art gallery with a painting of Barack Obama punching George Washington (if it hadn't been $300 I'd probably bought it for its hilarity). I did buy some moonshine though (ok I bought a lot of moonshine).
After driving for what seemed like hours and getting caught in one of the worst storms I've ever been in, as well as eating some of the best BBQ I've ever had. We made it to Clingman's Dome hoping to see 7 states or whatever it was they claimed from the peak.
For the first time I understood why they were called the Smokies.
My buddies also thought they'd climb some rocks, which a park ranger didn't see all that happy about but she let it go on the condition I didn't let them die, although it appears they almost did.
And for the record is was really cold up there too, it was probably 80-85 with 98% humidity in the lower elevations but it was 58 with a stiff breeze at 6,000 feet. We pawed through out cars in the search of something warm. Here's Jimmy demonstrating how BMW owners should look if they were either Canadian or Mountain Men.
I also bought a hat
After we'd thrown everything we had in the cars on us we began to climb the ADA approved path to the summit which said was only a half mile away.
Now I've never been in a wheelchair for any real length of time so I'm not sure how hard it is, but I do understand physics and if anyone thinks that gravity would allow anyone to take a wheelchair up a 15%+ grade needs to probably reconsider a few things.
On the way up though I got to hike the entire width of the Appalachian Trail, which I figured is just as good as hiking the entire length. In PUMA driving shoes never-the-less!
We finally made it to the summit after quite the climb and us all discovering we were woefully out of shape, but it couldn't be that easy. We were then greeted with some Soviet looking spiral structure that would provide the "stellar" view.
Ya so I about died of exhaustion for this!
After that we drove about three hours back to the cabin in a pounding thunderstorm, but we did get BBQ at a hole in the wall joint (actually I think it was a trailer). We got back to the cabin and sat around and drank an unhealthy amount of Yuengling Amber Lager, as well as Black and Tan.
Saturday
Saturday everyone wanted to make breakfast and screw around some more instead of driving. But we finally set off around 9 for a trip down the Blue Ridge Parkway to Mount Mitchell, the tallest peak in the Appalachians and supposed to offer one of the best views around. We also sought out another BBQ place (are you sensing a trend yet?).
The Blue Ridge Parkway was awesome and I have no idea what Top Gear thought was so bad about it, 45mph was plenty fast on some of those corners. The only downfall were people on bicycles who thought they should wear all white and ride in the middle of the road when there was 0 viability. I accidentally ran two bicyclist off the road too when I came around an uphill corner at 30mph and they were in the oncoming lane heading right at me. They were fine and didn't even fall off their bikes but I thought the one guy wanted to kill me. His female partner tore him a new one though so I just calmly made like a tree.
Anyway....here's the Blue Ridge Parkway.
First turn off:
Jasper thought he should climb about 30 feet up the cliff so he could yell at Harley riders...which he did for about 20 minutes.
At the highest point of the road.
We then took a break from the road so we could head to the BBQ joint which involved an hour ride down off the parkway to some little hick town. Now let me just say the hospitality at any southern restaurant is amazing and a vast majority of the waitresses are smoking hot. I'm normally not a huge tipper, although I do give a fair amount, but when some hot girl in tight jeans and t-shirt calls me hon and sweetie while bring me mountains of pig covered in sauce and sweet tea in a Mason jar, I have a tendency to tip well...very well. I really wish people in the north were that friendly at restaurants, or really just that friendly in general. Besides the bikers who were pretty much all from New York everyone was fantastically nice and acted like they were your best friend...and you believed them.
Even the cops were nice. We were filling up in the little hick town after stuffing ourselves full of pork, coleslaw and hushpuppies when two cops came up and started talking to us. They told us where a speed trap was up the road because we all looked like "friendly yankee boys". They shook our hands and told us to stay out of trouble and raced out of the gas station, if I didn't know any better I would have thought them Duke boys would have raced by too.
But back on the road we stopped at Looking Glass Falls, which was really pretty from a far but a complete hell hole close up. Every nasty person in the area and beyond were swimming around at the bottom of the falls. It smelled heavily of smoke, sweat and garbage. I was saddened but snapped picture of it anyways.
Back on the Parkway we continued to climb through the mountains while the weather got worse.
The last picture was what probably an hour of our drive was like and where I had the run in with the inconsiderate biker (who I assume was from New York because no one in the south was that much of an asshat).
But we made it to Mount Mitchell and continued to climb onwards and upwards. We were met with an outstanding view though!
Our cars were even being obscured by the thick fog (and that's the highest my car has ever been!)
So we drove back down the mountains and headed towards Asheville, which was much bigger than I thought it was going to be. We met up with Mike, who hadn't joined us for the trip along the Parkway for whatever reason and him, along with Jimmy and Kim, said they were tired and were going to head to the cabin. Jasper and I thought we should drive the two hours to the Dragon because why not? We also wanted to do what others were telling us was called the Moonshine run. We'd drive 129 to 441 (or something) to 28 into Bryson City all in the dark, so we set off and drove a really long ways via some little BBQ stand
We ended up at Deal's Gap sometime later and met up with a Mazda3 club, they were all pretty cool guys and we all exchanged lies about our conquest of the mountain roads. One guy was pretty hardcore though, he had a completely stripped out Mazdaspeed3 that he drove from Georgia in. He told us it was one of the most uncomfortable trips ever but totally worth it in the end.
Domo Kun was also along for the ride.
It was still probably an hour or two before sunset so Jasper and I shot some pictures of each others cars rounding the bends.
After we screwed around with that for a while we took off once again for Deal's Gap so we could top off the tanks and finish the Moonshine Run. About a mile from the start/finish for the Dragon we were flagged down by some Nissan guys who told us there was a bad accident up a head, so we took off to see if they needed any help. We arrived on the scene to see a very smashed Integra and an equally wrecked Protege. Apparently a guy on a Harley clipped the yellow line and side swiped the Integra who spun into the side of the mountain and clipped the Protege coming the other way. Apparently someone had to lock the Harley rider in their truck so the two car guys didn't kill him. They were both from way up in the Northeast and now their cars were toast because some Harley rider had to ride above their skill level. We took off when the cops came since we knew it'd be under control and there was nothing we could do.
We did see this sticker which was very fitting to say the least.
We did the Moonshine Run though and it was about the most thrilling experience in an automobile I've ever done since it started to pour while we were racing down the side of a mountain, it made it slightly sketchy. But it was a blast, I even had Bluegrass cranked on the radio to set the mood even more
. We made it back to the cabin at some late hour by the way of a Burger King, which had bacon on every sandwich and something called a bacon sundae (bacon and ice cream) which proved to me there was a God. Sunday
I drove for 13 hours and my mind went numb. The I hit Ohio and I zoned out for 4 hours since I had to do 65mph the whole way. I did get Skyline Chili though which tore up my stomach for the rest of the drive
I got home and promptly passed out on my bed since I had to be up in 8 hours for a 10 hour day of being on my feet at work.
It was totally worth it though and I can't wait to go back. I'd never really been around the south and they aren't nearly as backwards as I thought they'd be and they were way friendlier than I'd expected. The scenery was stunning, the food was amazing, the roads were out of this world and I could listen to country music without being looked at funny. Also everything was much cheaper, from the cost of fuel to the cost of groceries. I've ever started looking at what jobs might be down there because I really wouldn't mind living in Kentucky, Tennessee or North Carolina (just not the deep, deep south). So all you southerns, keep doing whatever it is you guys do (worship NASCAR I'd wager) because you really showed a northerner than it isn't all Dueling Banjos and making one another squeal like piggies.
TL;DR I went to the south, drove a lot of roads, ate a lot of BBQ and feel in love with the area.
