Brendan & Tiffany Sullivan

The weekend of 6/5, Tiff had gone to Ohio to visit the family for Andrew’s graduation. I spent a restless Thursday and Friday nights at home, as I didn’t have my wife with me and for whatever reason all of my normal activities (video games, programming, etc) just didn’t seem appealing.

So Saturday I decided to go for a drive. I ran from the apartment through a back-way into the Great Smoky Mountain National Park into the south end of Gatlinburg. It’s a great way to get to Gatlinburg, actually, as you can avoid all of the inevitably horrid Pigeon Forge and “spur” traffic. From there I took 321 out towards Cosby, then shot north to Newport via some back-roads, including a small section of Foothills Parkway.

Newport, TN is an interesting little town that I have never driven though before. Definitely worth more exploration someday. From there I decided that I wanted to go further east with a vague plan to loop south through North Carolina and hook back up with I-40  for a quick ride home. Well, somewhere along the way, i ran into the “end” of a road and was out of range of Verizon’s 3G so I couldn’t get anymore maps…..soooo I back-tracked and kept heading east.I ended up here…

Civil War?!

in Hot Springs, North Carolina. I was driving through town and all of a sudden about 1/4 mile from where this picture was taken, I heard and felt a boom that could not have been mistaken for anything but some kind of cannon. I obviously was very curious and kept driving into town. I came upon this Civil War Renactment “fair”. I know no details other than that, but I walked around for a minute and saw the cannons and a mock battle between cavalry and a detachment of riflemen. Sorry for the non-zoomed pictures… I took all of these  pics with the Droid.

Marching army

Cannons!!!

People in costume doing "camp" chores

If you’d like to see the route I drove, see the saved Google Map here