Pidgeon Forge - the entrance to Dollywood

After driving a while through Tennessee we came to Pigeon Forge. We had booked a motel room in Gatlinburg which was just on the other side. Gatlinburg is an entrancetown to the Great Smokie Mountains national park and we wanted to have a look around there. Pigeon Forge is also an entrance town. To Dollywood. Dolly Partons own Tennessee Themepark. This has apparently turned Pigeon Forge into a veritable Hillbilly Vegas. It was frightening.

Before the carnival sphere started, there were just huge billboards everywhere displaying the wonders of the place.
In between the commercials for Comedy Barn there were the ones for the Christian musical "Miracle"... and in between the carousels and minigolf there were crammed gaudy churches with electric billboards running gospel quotes and invitations into the arms of Jesus
.

Comedy Barn seemed to be something especialy scarry. I mean look at this guy holding that pig. He really looks a little too happy about it.

And there were Bears. On Display! To be fed and looked at. I cant help but wonder how the Bears really felt about that.

Gatlinburg was much the same really , but I must say that Pigeon Forge is the must disturbing place I have ever been.

Mia and the Wild Animals!

I haven't met the Bear yet. I have met a lot of other animals though. Thankfully mainly cute or just impressive ones. It seems that giant hawks are everywhere. And Squirrels. Squirrels are everywhere too and very very very cute. This inspires horrible images of squirrels being swooped upon and eaten by Hawks!

In Shenandoa we met a deer. It didn't care one little bit about us.

Also I found a very cuddly little bunny-rabbit eating grass and leaves close by me. It didn't care about me either.

Im still a little worried about meeting the Bear and I also found out that there are Bobcats as well! And that they are much more aggressive than Bear!

Its not at all like Bar-kitty.

Shenendoa

The national park Shenendoa in the appalachians...What can we say... it was beatiful. We spend most of the day driving through on the Sky Line road stopping for the spectacular views over the mountains. We also parked the car and went on a hike in the forest. At one point we were looking into the trees in a place with a light-green, soft and even undergrowth of some sort of grass or flower. It looked almost fairytale-like. Then a huge hawk, that we had been staring right at but not noticed took of from a branch maybe 5 m from where we stood. At the end of our walk we came upon a clearing filled with flowers and millions and millions of butterflies of all colors and sizes. Pictures couldn't capture it, but here's one anyway.

The whole day was just amazing. Im just going to put up a bunch of pictures!

Shepherdstown

We spent one evening in Shepherdstown in West Virginia before moving on the next day. Its a rather surprising place. Small town, rather a lot of tourists coming through... and also a university. Apparently in the summer the place is crammed with university students. Everything looks really old and extremely idyllic.

What we really didn't expect was that the town seemed full of bikers and girls with tatoos and piercings. We met a couple of girls hanging out on the steps in front of a bar called Mecklenburg Inn or something like that. We chatted with them for a while and ended up in the bar of course. On of them was the bar-keep Angie. She mixes drinks that will make you blind. She made us mojitos that burned the hairs out of our nostrils. As Alicia, the other girl, said: "She's a little heavy on the drinks".


We had a great evening with the girls and their friends and found out even more surprising things about Shepherdstown:
1: When ever anything insane happens in the town, it usually happens in Mecklenburg Inn. Just our luck to stumble in to the local crazy anarchy-drinkinghole. :) (It might be worth mentioning that the inner walls were made of steel. And they were dented.)
2: Mecklenburg inn has been selected by the Inquirer as one of the top 25 bars in USA.
3: Shepherdstown is the home of a large gay/lesbian community (among them our barkeep Angie and a few of the friends)

Behind the bar was a very peaceful and nice little garden, whit a pavilion, where a very nice guy made burgers and barbeque.

We ate our dinner there, sharing it with a very cute cat, that joined us at our table. We later found out, that this cat had many years previously been adopted by the bar. It was known as Bar-kitty or simply BK. Every bar should have a bar-kitty.

Just like in DC it was a little heartbreaking to leave all these great people and that wonderful place behind us. It's great making new friends and having a fun time, but no fun at all to ramble on and leave it all behind again... but I guess thats just the way a rock'n'rollercoaster works.

The Civil War Storyteller

After DC we went to Shepherdstown. This is a weird little town in West Virginia. We did this because it was close to Antietam where a huge and bloody civilwar battle was faught. Also, the guidebook told us it was a special and nice little place. We drove back and forth in the town for a frustratingly long time before we found a place to stay, but when that was done, we went to Antietam. As it happened we were extremely lucky to arive just ten minutes before a guided tour would start. So we took off on a guided battlefield tour with our ranger-like guide; John.

Now John knew just about everything about the civil war. And as he told us the details of the horrendous events of each location. How the different segments under the army moved across which field and under which commander... and when John told about battles you could smell the blood. You could see the young men breaking through the edges of the head-high cornfield to be slaughtered down by the waiting enemy regiment. The battle in Antienam went on for just one day, but it was the single most bloody day in american history. 23000 men were killed. It was a fantastic story to be told in the actual battle locations. And John made it come completely alive.

Kramerbooks

We made a Haiku about Kramerbooks, that is to be the Haiku for DC in general.

Booze, beer and books
Drunken bliss with quirky friends
Bountiful haven

The Car. The Rock'n'rollercoaster.

We picked up the car. It's a black convertible Mustang. The licenceplate says 5eax66.

We love it so much.

Psychics!

By the way, for some reason DC seems to have a unusually high number of "psychic women"! Your classical fortuneteller you might say. There were an abundance of signs offering handreadings, tarot-readings and clairvoyants. We were making fun of such a sign, when we discovered that "Ms. Tina" was sitting right next to us i front of her little shop. She took it in good spirits though and even let us get a picture of her and her poster

The DC sights

There is a lot of impressive stuff in DC and the day we took the bus, we saw many of the major sights. We circled around capitol a lot and got of there in the end, since we wanted to see the Jefferson library. The whole government area is build to look important and intimidating and it certainly does. Look at this evil empirialist bird.

When we got to Capitol, I really really needed to find a toilet. Very much. So we went to a building on the other side of the street from Capitol. This turned out to be Russel Senate Office Building, and there were two police officers in the entrance, who scanned our bags and pointed me in the direction of the ladies room. After passing several offices with very important looking staff, I releaved myself in I highly polished government loo. I then went back to the police guys who had been chatting with Ivan. They turned out to be Bill and John and John was complaining. The thing that bugged him, was that he once again had not been nominated for Prettiest People on Capitol Hill. They apparently have a government beauty-contest. John, who is a little chubby and probably in his late thirties, was very hurt by this lack of nomination, since he was obviously the prettiest cop on Capitol. Bill heartily agreed that he was. They invited us to drink beer with them at their local after-work hangout, but we declined in a friendly way and went to se the Library of Congress. Even thought they were very nice guys. And pretty. The Library that Jefferson build is so beautiful that it was even worth not drinking with the prettiest cop at Capitol for.

Eating in Georgetown

Our last full day in DC was spent on a tourist sightseeing bus! We got a good view of most of the ciy this way while being thourrougly fried from above and whipped by overhanging branches. It was absolutely brilliant. We got of the bus in Georgetown, a very old and charming part of DC.

I shopped for a while and then we ate lunch at FIVE GUYS. This is a good american burger joint and the burger was the best I've ever had. Ivan well knows the FIVE GUYS chain from his earlier stays in the US and understood my newfound love perfectly. The employees was a bunch of cute black girls in uniforms and they all seemed very happy and friendly. The shining center of Five Guys is the Five guys MAMA. We loved her. She was in fact the mother of some of the girls and had a very motherly vibe about her.

When I tolm Mama, that we just didn't get burgers like that in Denmark she got all teary-eyed and said: "You poor thing! You come back here to Five Guys, we'll get you a burger! You hear me, y'all come back here now, we'll get you the burger!"

Ask me about Big Bangs and Black holes

One of the museums we visited was the Smithsonian Air and Space museum. Ivan enjoyed all the scientific stuff and the history and details, but I must admit I just thougt it was funny to see the old space suits, the hilarious first attempts at spaceships and what else I could find of quirky stuff... f. ex. the never-present curator, most knowledgable in the field of big bangs and black holes. We'll never know where Curator went. Maybe he is still out there somewhere, biding his time...

Underground

After a while we really felt very comfortable in DC. We used the Metro a lot to get around to the different museums and so. I completely depend on Ivan for navigation of course, since I would be forever lost to the world of daylight if I tried to find my way around the Metro myself. The DC Metro has a very simple and very nice industrial design that Ivan is absolutely crazy about. It certainly does have a dark and dystopian charm!