For Aeris

Love,

Tiff

Cades Cove

After church, Tiff and I were trying to decide what to do for the afternoon, and ended up going for a drive. We were originally just going to run Cades Cove in the truck, see the newly paved loop (FINALLY), and come home. As usual, that didn’t work out quite how we expected. First surprise of the day were the horses up near the fence!

Tiff petting a horse

Herd gathered near the road

We kept driving and enjoying the scenery, and I was happy because I could cruise along with the truck’s automatic transmission rather than having to constantly clutch up, over, and down hills with the Kia. Totally changes the experience of driving that loop. Somewhere along the loop, we saw a deer (not horribly uncommon, but still fun)…

Fuzzy deer

Me actually having fun driving Cades Cove (actually I think that's Parson's Branch)

After driving the loop, we took the “shortcut” that lets you go back to the beginning of the loop for people who are masochistic enough to want to drive that road more than once in a single day We did it this time because I wanted to finally drive Parson’s Branch Road which is one of the ways out of Cades Cove and leads to the Dragon. Thus, this was the first time I’d used this crossover, and to my surprise and pleasure, found there was a relatively deep water crossing. (Tiff, why aren’t there pictures of the cool parts? )

Unfortunately, I get to do very little (read:no) off-roading, so I always get giddy as a school-girl over the most mundane of ‘non-paved’ surfaces, especially when I’m in a 4×4. This particular crossing was about 2 feet deep and there were people picnicking nearby, so I didn’t let my irresponsible self get the better of me  and thrash through it. It was still fun to drive through, though, and as expected, the truck was just fine. After quickly(ish) going half-way around the loop again to get to the Parson’s Branch entrance, we stopped to use the restrooms and headed towards the entrance to Parson’s Branch.

Somewhere near the beginning of Parson's Branch

Parson’s Branch is a “primitive road” that is essentially a partially graded path that inhabitants of Cades Cove used to use back in the days before cars. It’s smooth enough that a family sedan might…i repeat… MIGHT get through, but I wouldn’t bet on it. The Escape handled it with ease, but with all the rain we’ve had, some of the rocks were pretty slick and the 4×4 kicked in a couple of times. It is about 10 miles long, and there is zero cell phone coverage out there, so don’t try it in your car and then try to call AAA when you get stuck. You’ll be kinda screwed. There are 18 water crossings on Parson’s Branch as well, but none of them very deep. I think at the most we went through 6 inches of water up there.

Mom and Rich, this one's for you

One of the wider water-crossings

After we got to the end of Parson’s Branch, we exited onto the Dragon, where Tennessee put up some horrifically confusing signage about which way to go to get off (there was a rock slide up there earlier this year that is blocking the Dragon from the TN side (where we needed to go)), so we tried to go north towards to rock slide to see if there was any way around it. Sadly there was not, so that meant we had to drive into North Carolina, and either go to Cherokee, NC, back up through the park to get home, or go over Cherohala Skyway to get home. Either way was about a 3 hour venture, so we decided to go for Cherohala, since that’s a fun road with great views, and took that back. AAAAAAAND that’s the end of this post. I’ll put up some pictures in a couple days that we took from that road.

In the end, we got home about 9:30pm that night, for a grand total of 7.5 hours of driving. And we covered a grand total of 160 miles. Not so good on the average speed there considering the last hour we were cruising at 60-70mph Oh well, it was a fun day.

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

Thus, with my usual flurry of research, I took a few days of reading reviews and such and decided I wanted either a pair of Grado SR60i’s, or I’d bump up my budget a bit and get a set of Sennheiser HD555. I’ve listened to a few Sennheiser ‘phones at Guitar Center, Best Buy, etc and none of the mid-priced offerings there impressed me. Not bad headphones, just not impressive. So I focused my search on trying to find a set of Grados to listen to, for as much as I’d read/heard about them, I’ve never actually been able to listen to a pair. Grado dealers are not very common as they are a small company that does not produce at the quantities needed to sell through a major chain like Best Buy or similar.

Coincidentally, I found a Grado dealer here in Knoxville the next morning. One of our hosting clients at work called the other day and was asking about some billing issues. Turns out he owned a small audio shop in Knoxville I didn’t know about called Statement Media. I poked around on his site a bit and realized he carried some pretty high end stuff: JL Audio, McIntosh, Paradigm, B&W, Denon, etc. I called back and asked if they were a Grado dealer and they said yes! “Do you have a pair of SR60i’s in stock I could listen to?”.. “Yes” again! Wow, lucky day.

I almost immediately locked up the office and took off to find their shop tucked away next to PF Changs. I’d driven past this gold-mine of audio equipment for almost 4 years and never knew they were there. (Cue Tiff’s fear for our bank account). Walked in with a bunch of music on my Droid and stood around for maybe 30 minutes listening to the SR60’s on that, and was immediately hooked on the headphones, and appalled at the quality of my music collection. There’s been an argument for years on the sound quality difference between ‘lossy’ (mp3) and ‘lossless’ (FLAC and WAV) digital audio file formats. Up til now, I was a firm believer that the LAME encoder on the –insane preset was more than enough quality for even semi-critical listening. That is, until I listened to those mp3’s on the Grados.

The SR60i’s are incredibly accurate and detailed headphones for the price. It absolutely blew me away how much noise and nastiness was present in the believed-to-be-quality mp3’s on my Droid. Switched to some FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) music I had. Holy crap these headphones are amazing. There really are not words. If you appreciate music even in the slightest and want to spend a moderate amount of money on a set of headphones that will really bring out all of the subtlety the recordings you listen to have to offer, you absolutely MUST at least listen to a set of Grados. For the price, I really do not see how these things are not the most popular headphone in the world. They are slightly lacking in bass output compared to my PX100’s, but they make up for it in very, very clean output even at extremely high levels and just powered off of my Droid or PC.

I’ll update in the future with “real” pics, but for now, here’s what they look like…

Grado SR60i

It’s not approved yet, but you can possibly improve the odds by using the Facebook “Like” widget on the right.

Now GO AND DO MY BIDDING!

(also, see his art blog here: http://mattsynowiczblog.blogspot.com/)

UNACCEPTABLE

Here’s a new one.

If you haven’t yet tried the new Mountain Dew flavors, you need to go out and see which one you like.

Distortion is definitely my favorite at this point with Typhoon being a close second. White Out is *meh*

I know we have a few Dew drinkers in the family, so get out there and try one (or 3)!

Sitting at Smashing Tomato Pizza in Lexington KY with mom, Rich, and Jeanette for Tiff’s birthday

Tristan on his dirt bike

We rode dirt bikes a little bit, but since the ground was so soft from the recently melted snow, only a very little. Dad, Tristan, and I did do some spring maintenance to the bikes however. Cleaned the carbs, helped dad get the fuel drain screw out of the float bowl on tristan’s bike, and changed the brake fluid in both bikes (Tristan’s Suzuki and Dad’s Honda CRF150)

Leander played the piano for me in the morning

Tristan played for us twice

Both Leander and Tristan have excelled at their piano practicing. Tristan especially is very very talented and obviously has the ear and coordination to play some very impressive pieces.

I taught Lee how to shoot the pellet gun.

Tristan came out after a bit to try out the newly sighted in rifle

We also rode the motorcycles again Monday. Dad and Mom started off on the K1200GT and Tiff and I rode the VTX1800. After we rode for about an hour or two we stopped for lunch and switched bikes. Tiff said the BMW is more comfortable as a passenger which sort of surprised me, but it /is/ a BMW after all. Both bikes are great and the handlebar risers that dad has put on the GT make a huge difference. And man is that bike fast. 150HP will do that though

That’s about the gist of our trip… Music, motorcycles, guns, spending lots of time with the family, and lots of good food from mother.

I woke up this morning at 6:15 and quickly got myself in the car and over to Archie’s house to help him get the boat hooked up to his truck and get the bait and tackle prepped. He lives less than 5 minutes from the boat ramp he uses, so we were in the water by 7:15am and had the rods out by 7:30.

Starboard side trolling gear

The bulk of our activity happened from then til about 10:00am.  We caught nearly 40 fish in the first two hours we were out there, just slowly trolling along at a GPS-indicated 9/10ths of a mile per hour Then once the sun came out and it started warming up, the fish quit biting. So we tried a new spot about 15 minutes (by boat) away. We caught a few more there, but ultimately chalked it up to a kinda slow day. Totalled 57 fish caught, ~35-40 were crappie (what we were going for), and of those, only 8 were over the minimum length to keep. But we did keep those 8

Crappie on ice

After we got back to the launch ramp about 1pm, we loaded up the boat, went back to the house, and filleted the fish for dinner. I brought them home and we fried them up as Archie said we should flour, egg, cornmeal, and whatever spices we wanted, then fried in oil. Delicious Tiff took some pictures of them…. I’ll add those to the post sometime soon.

*Fried fish, yummy!

frying in the dutch oven

ready to eat!

*Last two photos and captions added by Tiff