Date: 2003-10-22
To: Cowee Mountain
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: broken clouds

Backtracking¢¦I closed on the sale of my apartment on September 20. CitiBank delayed wiring the buyer's money until too late for me to get all of it in the bank, so I had to carry it upstate. I spent the weekend in Stockport, NY, came back to the city on Monday, deposited the rest of the money, picked up my rental and drove out of the city. Two days later, after an uneventful drive, I arrived in Charlotte, North Carolina and bought a brand new 2003 orange Honda Element. After filling out the paperwork for a bank transfer as payment, I left for Hendersonville, where I rented a storage locker for my stuff. I spent the night there and went back to Charlotte the next day to pick up my brand new 2003 orange Honda Element. But wait! The bank transfer got screwed up so I had to spend the whole day getting it straightened out and wait for the money to be wired before I could drive off. Anyway, late that day, the deal was finally consummated and I set off for my parents¢ in Chicago. I got as far as Hendersonville late that night. I felt like a yo-yo.A day and a half later, as I sat in traffic (in my brand new 2003 orange Honda Element) on the Dan Ryan, asking myself why I didn't go around the city, the Cubs actually won a playoff game.I finally got to my parents¢ house and spent a quiet week with them. I then spent a night in Ft. Wayne, Indiana with my sister¢s family and headed down here. I got as far as Newport, Tennessee that night and the next morning decided to take the Foothills Parkway to and then through the Smokies. What I didn¢t see on the map was that the section of the parkway I took was only seven miles long. That cartographic faux pas condemned me to the Gatlinburg Crawl ¢ several miles of the slowest, narrowest, most tourist-ridden highway through the worst tourist trap in the western hemisphere. Thank god it was early on a fall morning. If it had been the height of the summer tourist season it could have taken me hours to crawl through. As it was, I was so pleased to see the end of it, I ran the last red light out of town. Oops. No cops around, just angry tourists.I finally got to the Smokies. Slowly, in the middle of a long line of cars, I made my way up the mountains and over Newfound Gap. Deciding to preview the Appalachian Trail, I detoured to Clingman¢s Dome, the highest point in the Smokies. After parking, I made my way, slowly, with many pauses, up the thousand vertical-foot, mile-long trail to the observation tower. Clouds above, clouds in the valleys below, clear as a bell in between. To the east and north, ridge after ridge of mountains, to the west, country music, to the south, Atlanta, lost in its own smog.Forgetting to find the Appalachian Trail, I came back down from the observation tower and read some of the educational stuff by the parking lot. Found out that the observation deck was three-hundred vertical feet and half a mile from the parking lot. Pant-pant. Does not bode well.My stuff finally got here a week and a half ago and I drove over to Hendersonville to meet the movers and pick up some other stuff I wanted with me. My temporary North Carolina license tag was missing when I got there and I assumed that it had disintegrated because of all the driving I had been doing. I drove all the way back to Franklin afraid of being pulled over. The drive back was a nice, slow windy one along Highway 64, through Pisgah National Forest. When I got back, I mentioned my license plate loss to someone here as a reason I didn't want to go to town again until my permanent plates came and he said that the goats probably ate it. It¢s happened before. Livestock here includes four goats, two dogs, five (I think) cats, two Tennessee walking horses, one pony (again, I think), a mule, and a flock of guinea hens. If the goats hadn¢t gotten it, something else probably would¢ve. Anyway, the goat eating my plates ¢ probably true. How do you tell that to a cop? I got the permanent plate two days later. Road trips are on again.Had some hand, wrist, elbow and shoulder problems the last ten days. Took lots of aspirin and used my hot and cold gel pack (see, not a luxury) and things seem to be better. They let me limit myself to marking cuts on timbers last week and not cutting and that helped a lot.