Sunday, May 14
Wonderful hike on Saturday, but this was going to be another long-haul day, especially since we’d never been that far South before. It was also Mother’s Day! Seems like we’re always traveling on Mother’s Day, which is a credit to our Mothers’ heritage.
That morning the hotel breakfast was waitressed (rather than buffet-style), and a young one spilled a tray of breakfast before we got seated. Not a good way to start a day for her. Hope she took it in stride, especially if she’s a mother, and we gave her a nice tip later.
Time to hit the road, but we actually had more of New River Gorge NP to see first. We cruised through the town of Beckley and then way, way down route 3 in WV towards Hinton. This was the real Southern entrance of the Park and where the New River (egged on by the Bluestone River) gets wild. We turned North on the River Road (route 26) in Hinton and followed it for 20 miles or so along the riverside, downstream to the falls.
The river road on the West bank, and apparently the river road on the East bank, was a trip. You might call it a hippie enclave, but I’m sure a number of the itinerant residents would object to being called hippies. This was a riverside city made out of old RVs, trailers, ingenious shelters, and ancient porta-potties. I’m sure all the stuff gets washed away and/or shifted every few years by the river. But the people there seemed to be saying that they could take that, they just wanted to hang out on the river’s edge and fish when they needed to. There would be bad years, but hopefully they’d be outnumbered by good years.
We got to the end of route 26, back in the territory administered by the National Park, and parked in their quarter-full lot for a wonderful, mellow hike. This was the Sandstone Falls area itself (as opposed to the Sandstone Falls Overlook), and they have a boardwalk out to the falls, and then a nature trail on the island formed by the falls, which is a mile loop.
In an outrageous Spring, this place would have been overwhelmed as much as the trailer village we’d seen upstream, and it has often been overwhelmed by the river from the piles of debris that we saw around the island. But at that time it was just right, and though we saw some spectacular water running through the island, most flowed around it, forming a beautiful falls and even more spectacular rapids. The wider part of that juncture of the New River had formed the long, stately falls, across a few hundred yards. But then we walked further out the boardwalk and the rest of the river was a wild cascade. We had seen this part from the overlook the day before yesterday, and now we were right there with it, seeing the tumult and feeling the steam.
Great walk on the island trail after that, meeting only one other couple. It was a yellow, sunny morning again after the rains of the last few days, and the plants and small wildflowers were reveling in the river mud. Woodpeckers rattled and frogs honked.
Back to the car and it was still too early for lunch (and the parking lot was getting crowded), so we pressed on to the South, following route 20 back to Interstate 77, and back into Virginia. As I say, my itch to see exotic places (the more vernacular the better) was scratched pretty good on that trip. This late morning drive down through Southernmost WV and into VA was exactly what I wanted.
There were tunnels on the Interstate from WV into VA, and then a long, swoopy drive at 75 MPH (no one was going faster, so we didn’t) from the mountains into the valley. We stopped at a rest area and had an excellent PB&J lunch in one of their pavilions, though some beggars bothered us (crows and chipmunks that is).
Switched to Interstate 81 in Wytheville (as before, lots of trucks but in general a genteel drive) and motored West in a seam of the mountains, through Bristol VA into Tennessee. 81 joined Interstate 40 and soon after that we finally exited on 66/441 through Sevierville (pronounced “SeVERE-ville”) to Pigeon Forge and then to Gatlinburg TN, right on the edge of the National Park. This was as far West as we got that trip. But hold on cowboy!
You would not believe the stretch of tourist traps between the Interstate and the National Park, or maybe you’ve seen or heard of it. I’ll tell you, we were unprepared for it, expecting more rural landscape. I should have been tipped off when I made hotel reservations and there were a lot of them with high prices. I apologize to people who want entertainment strips like that, but this was way over the top for me and Sarah, I don’t even know how to describe it. There were gigantic neon signs and billboards, and around every curve on the three-lane highway was another jaw-dropping spectacle. Two that got me were the Hatfield and McCoy dinner theater, an all-you-can-eat attraction (to see hillbillys get even further denigrated?), and the upside-down palace, which really was an upside-down palace.
Anyway, the strip finally ended and we were traveling through a greenspace, but then we got to Gatlinburg TN and it was even worse! Again, many people seemed to be loving the artificially propped-up fairyland that Gatlinburg was (they had a Bubba Gump shrimp house and an “Alpine” chairlift ride), and had chosen it as a vacation destination. I had the feeling that I was in the wrong space and/or time, but when we finally arrived at our hotel the desk clerk assured me that I was in the right place and that we had a reservation. Sarah and I counted ourselves lucky that the hotel we’d made reservations at was hanging on the outskirts of town, though they were building yet another hotel behind it, and to have our fifth-floor room be blessed with a mountain view. They also had a patio overlooking “the Creek” that a lot of the hotels around there gushed about, but it was nothing really special.
We’d checked out local dinner options (we could have gone to Bubba Gump’s!), and there was a Smoky Mountains Brewery downtown. Knowing we might be sorry but sometimes you have to go for it, we hiked over to the brewhouse and had a fine meal, though it was incredibly bright and noisy in there. I got their guest IPA and then their flagship IPA, which was very impressive. Sarah got a cocktail special and we both had salads. Nice to be there but not for long, and I have to give our waiter four stars, though there was a bit of language difficulty.
Waded back through the writhing downtown and back to our fifth-floor room at the Hampton Inn – Historic Nature Trail (there are three Hampton Inns in town so don’t be fooled!). A little reading and then soon to bed. It had been a long road day and we forgot to get the mileage, but it had been quite a journey from Beckley.
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