After two years of talking about taking a trip to the Smoky Mountains I finally did it. The really nice guy and I took off work Friday to spend the weekend in a cabin in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. And before you start getting your hopes up: No, we didn't go to Dollywood, Dollywood's Splash Country, Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede, Dolly's I Make Money In Pigeon Forge No Matter What I Do, or anything else that is owned by a blond country singer.
The whole trip was planned as a romantic getaway but as always when you have that perfect picture in your head reality hardly lives up to it. Everything was fine in Kentucky (now that's a nice motto for the license plate...) but once we entered Tennessee traffic was getting heavier. By the time we left the interstate we were stuck in a slow moving bumper-to-bumper chain of cars with only one target: The nearest pancake house in Gatlinburg - and it's a good thing that there are so many of them. Our always reliable navigation system Susie told us to go straight for 10 miles, then fell asleep, and rightfully so because in the next hour we only managed to drive two.
Finally, we arrived at the rental office. The really nice guy got out of the car to get the keys for our cabin. "Could you take a picture?" he asked and disappeared in the office. I am not the most patient person and all the waiting in traffic had worn me out. I really didn't want to take a photo. In my picture-perfect plan, we would have been to the chalet already, had jumped into the hot tub and were on our way to a restaurant for a romantic dinner. "And picture of what?" I asked myself. We were parked in a side street, it was already dark and there wasn't really anything spectacular to see. The entrance of the office building had been beautifully decorated, though. The really nice guy hadn't come back and I was getting bored so I decided to take a picture of the Halloween decoration.
Fifteen minutes and twenty-four pictures of pumpkins later I thought it was time to take the chance of leaving the car unlocked and find out what the hold-up was. When I entered the rental office the really nice guy was engrossed in a conversation with one of the staff. "It's all my fault," the man behind the counter said and continued to talk about the time he had spent in Munich. "Great," I thought, "finally someone to blame for global warming!" But no, as it turned out, he had offered to get us two keys for the chalet. Unfortunately, he forgot to mention that the second key had to be specially made for us. I was wondering why we needed two keys in the first place but since they've already gone out of their way who was I to spoil all that special treatment?
We left the office half an hour later with two keys (one of them was really shiny) and a cryptic map that should help us find the cabin. "That can't be too difficult," I thought - and oh boy, was I wrong. The map was useless and we had to rely on Susie. She pointed us into the general direction, we followed the street up a hill, traffic was getting less and less, it was pitch-black and impossible to read any house numbers... and right at the moment when we were in the middle of a small intersection she announced, "You have reached your final destination." Well...
I admit that I'm never traveling light but I didn't pack a tent so that camping in the middle of the street was not an option. We got out of the car, knelt down on the street and carefully crawled on all fours towards what we hoped was the nearest building. Once we were close enough to read the house number we almost couldn't believe our luck - we were at the cabin next to the one we rented! If you've never been to the Smoky Mountains you may think that we still hadn't made it at that point because you may picture secluded chalets in the forest with at least a mile distance between each of them. That's what I thought, too, but I couldn't have been more mistaken. If I ever get familiar with the US system of measures I could tell you exactly how many inches the distance is between two cabins but as a firm believer in the metric system let's just put is this way: We got up from the street in front of the neighbor house and if we had stumbled and fallen down we would have hit our heads at our cabin.
Will there be any more surprises when we open the door to our cabin, or will the rest of the evening go according to plan?
I'll keep you posted.
Bis bald,
SAPgirl
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