I’ve been to Great Smoky Mountains National Park probably a half dozen times, and it’s always been one of my favorite places. True, it’s not the dramatic beauty of the national parks out west, but in its own way, and at the right times, it holds its own kind of appeal. For example, GSMNP has more waterfalls per square mile than any place on earth. Why? Waterfalls require two things: water and a place to fall. That’s why they’re called “water-falls.” GSMNP gets an incredible 85 inches of rainfall per year, and provides nearly 6000 feet of elevation change across its width. The combination of the two means lots of water falling all over the place. So, even in nondescript no-name locations, glancing around provides truly beautiful instances of waterfalls.

And then, of course, there are the fall colors when billions of hardwoods erupt into a display of color that defies description (and defies capturing in a way that conveys the true effect).

This trip, though, was, well, I don’t want to say it was a disappointment, but GSMNP was not what I expected. In retrospect, I realized that I’d only been to the park in the fall, when bursts of autumn color lit up the hills, the air was crisp and cool, and the park pretty much deserted. Not this time. Not on any count. First, the park was jammed. Like Manhattan jammed. Or maybe Tokyo jammed. (I’ve never been to Tokyo, but in my mind the experience in the park was sort of like people being shoved into subway cars with giant plungers.) And it’s not just my normal (i.e., abnormal) aversion to crowds. In 2020, the park had 12.1 million visitors, trailing only the Blue Ridge Parkway (14.1 million, and which is contiguous with GSMNP) and the Golden Gate Bridge (12.4 million). Furthermore, most of those visitors come during the summer months, and we were there at the very period (late July) that defines “summer months.”

Second, the park is adjacent to Gatlinburg and just a few miles from Pigeon Forge. Which means that the park is, for many of its visitors, an extension of the Dollywood theme park, T-shirt shop, go-cart-racing, water-slide, Ripley’s-Believe-It-Or-Not-“museum” experience. Really. For example, there are places in Gatlinburg that rent go-cart-like off-road open-air vehicles, stripped of normal vehicle accessories, like mufflers, and people drive these around the park roads. So, anywhere one goes within earshot of a road means one will be oppressed by a constant din of families out for a spin around the park in go-carts. Or here’s another one. Many people bring with them a supply of brightly colored inner tubes so the little darlings can float down the park’s rivers. “Many people” like thousands of them. The park becomes, in essence, a water theme park as much as a national park. One more. The aforementioned waterfalls, besides having trailheads that are jammed for a mile or more on either side, become the equivalent of diving-board / water-slide play areas, with the pools at the bottoms of the waterfalls filled with people swimming and diving and generally having a raucous good time.

None of this is necessarily bad. In fact, a lot of it (minus the unmuffled go-carts) is wonderful. There’s something great about watching a bunch of kids playing in a river, jumping on inner tubes, hurling buckets water through the air to torment little girls, and all the other forms of good, wholesome fun. It’s really wonderful to be at a picnic area watching kids climbing trees only to fall out and break their arms like God intended. It’s just that there’s something incongruous about the experience. It’s just not a national-park-experience. It’s something else. And, in the end, it’s just not something we find worth traveling for.

Finally, part of the reason for the trip was for me to do a little photography, capturing an aspect of the park (the summer presentation) that I’d never seen before. So, I saw it. Meh. Maybe I didn’t have the right attitude, but in the summer the park is basically green. Lots of green. Green everywhere. And my limited artistic skills got quickly exhausted by trying to be creative with green.

So, on all counts, this was probably it for summertime trips to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I’ll go back, to be sure, in the fall. And I do want to try an excursion in the spring when the hills are alive with the sound of, no, wrong sentence, are alive with gazillions of blooming azaleas and rhododendrons. So there will be further posts about the park, and the wonders that it holds. But not in summer.

As mentioned in the previous post, we had a great time at our first (and maybe only) RV excursion to the NASCAR races at Atlanta Motor Speedway. That we had such a great time, though, was due in large part to the wonderful people we met there, most of whom were “KYD Insiders.” Here’s the deal…

Several years ago, Robert recommended a YouTube channel, “Keep Your Daydream.” That channel chronicles the adventures of a couple, Marc and Tricia Leach, who decided to go full-time in a small’ish travel trailer and travel around the U.S. with their three teenage children (and a very large Golden Retriever). Try to picture a Ford F-250 (a mid-size pickup) with three teenagers and a large dog in the back seat, pulling a trailer, with everything needed for a life on the road either in the minimal storage space in the trailer itself, or crammed in the bed of the truck. And “everything needed for a life on the road” means clothing, linens, food, supplies, household items, tools, outdoor cooking appliances and equipment, school materials for the little darlings, computer and camera equipment, trailer accessories, etc. etc. etc. As I’m writing this, I’m thinking “that’s impossible,” even though I watched them do it. In any event, over the course of the past six years, they would publish a weekly update on where they’ve been, what they’ve learned, and tips for anyone considering the same course, along with a stream of thoughts on anything related (or sometimes even unrelated) to RV living. Besides the YouTube channel, they also maintained a website (KeepYourDaydream.com), a blog, a podcast, a FaceBook page, an e-mail distribution list, several Instagram accounts, and probably more media that I’m not thinking of. After a hiatus of a couple years, prompted in part by the need to watch anything during the COVID shutdown, we binge-watched all six seasons of the YouTube videos.

At first during their life on the road, Marc continued to work remotely at his consulting business, but eventually the KeepYourDaydream enterprises were generating sufficient revenue to support the family. And, as these things go, there developed a community of “followers,” which in turn led to a subset of followers who contribute a small amount every month (or every video) and who are known as “KYD Insiders.” That’s where we come in.

The NASCAR event that we attended was also a meetup for KYD Insiders. We decided to join the meetup, even though we weren’t sure what to expect. The KYD media seem mostly geared towards brand-new RVers and/or RVers traveling (full-time or not) with children, and neither category includes us. On the other hand, though, one of the things we like about Marc and Trish’s broadcasts that both of them are completely charming people, whose philosophies about life, including how to deal with a surplus of children in the back seat, were irresistibly engaging. What the heck, we thought, let’s meet them in person and see what happens.

All told, there were about 40-50 KYD Insider families at the Speedway. As expected, nearly all of them had purchased their first RV within the past year, and most of them had children that they traveled with. And all of them were friendly, well-educated, funny, and generally the kind of people we love spending time with. As Wendy put it, “these are our peeps.” So we spent hours sitting around talking, sharing adventures at the racetrack, drinking, eating, drinking, watching the races, and drinking.

There’s a philosophy that is palpable in the KYD media: there’s no such thing as a “perfect” RV, and if you wait until everything if exactly right, you’ll never go. As they put it, “start small and start now.” And, there’s no such thing as a perfect trip. If you insist that every trip be free from the dips and bumps that go along with traveling, you’ll quit RVing as soon as you start. Both views seemed to be their philosophy applied to just about every aspect of day-to-day living: things are never “perfect” so don’t wait until they are and don’t get all lathered up when things go wrong. That view maybe has more opportunities for application in an RV (vehicles that are notoriously trouble-prone), but it’s a darn appealing view across the board.

That philosophy, then, gets adopted (or appealed to those who already held to the same view) by those who felt themselves gravitating towards the KYD media, which means all of the Insiders had the same easy-going, life-relishing, people-loving attitude as the Leaches. As one of our newly-minted friends put it, unhappy people tend to get annoyed by happy people, which means that the kind of harrumphing grumps one has to deal in everyday life will self-exclude from a group like KYD Insiders, leaving only the better sort of people in the remainder.

And Marc and Trish are just as charming in person as they are on YouTube. Even though they are sort of “celebrities” in a sense, at least among the Insiders group, the Leaches are unassuming, engaging, and good natured with everyone they meet, and they take time to meet everyone.

We may or may not go to another NASCAR event someday, but Wendy and I are both committed to the idea that we definitely will do another KYD Insider event.

Add one more notch to the stock of our RV adventures: NASCAR. Yup, four days at Atlanta Motor Speedway for a 400-mile NASCAR cup event, along with a boatload of other activities. It’ll actually take me a couple posts to get the full story out, so this is installment number one. First, some background.

At one point, NASCAR was the most popular spectator sport in the U.S., with event viewership numbers consistently over 10 million, eclipsing MLB, NFL, and NBA in the number of viewers per weekly event. And the same was true for in-person attendance. NASCAR’s major venues were all routinely sold out, with tracks such as Bristol (capacity 160,000!), sold out for 55 events in a row!

But beginning in the early 2000s, things started to level off, and then precipitously decline. By 2015, ratings were down in nearly all the races, and in more than half they were the lowest they’d been since the 1990s. And viewership and attendance continue to decline. By 2021, ratings were often sinking to new lows across all events.

Our experience confirms the analysis. In chatting with track workers, we were repeatedly told that both the camping areas and track attendance were only a fraction of what they were a couple decades ago.

There are lots of reasons offered for the decline. All major sports are seeing declines in viewership (except for soccer, which, as everyone knows, is not actually a sport, at least for real Americans). NASCAR’s ever-changing rules and championship rankings have put off many fans. The NASCAR in-person experience, which used to be something like a midway with souvenir haulers, has been taken over by corporate retail operations. But mostly it’s that various cultural changes are making high-power stock car racing just less appealing, especially to young people.

Having said all that, though, our experience at NASCAR was completely wonderful. Much (most) of that was due to the link-up with the Keep Your Daydream crew (more on that in the next post), but even the NASCAR experience itself was enjoyable beyond anything we expected. This may be one-time been-there/done-that experience, but for an event in that category, we have no complaints.

Just to be clear, though, even though this is an RV blog, bringing the motorhome to Atlanta Motor Speedway is not “camping” by any sane definition. It’s more like tailgating in a parking lot for four days.

The weekend began with a charity run around the track in Nana’s little Ford Edge. For a $50 donation, we were allowed to take the car onto the track’s 1.54-mile quad-oval with 24-degree banked turns. There was a souped-up Camaro pace car leading us, which kept speeds to a “respectable” range, although most cars were nowhere near keeping up with even that modest pace. I mostly did keep up with the pace car, having fallen back by only a couple hundred yards by the end of the 4.5-mile “race.” My top speed was somewhere around 95 on the straightaways, which was about as fast as our little car seemed happy about, and slowed to 80-85 in the turns, which is where the car felt a little squirrely and I was too chicken (I know I’m mixing taxonomic groups) to push it. Only afterwards, after watching a race, did I learn I was my driving strategy was backwards. I was driving low in the straights and going up in the corners–it should have been the opposite. Darn. I’m sure I would have given the pace car a run for this money and set the Ford Edge track record had I known the proper driving technique.

Then the NASCAR races started. Saturday was the first race, the Infinity-Series 250-mile race. The Infinity series, we learned, is supposed to be the “minor league” for NASCAR, featuring up-and-coming drivers who aspire to the big-league “NASCAR Cup” series. The cars are built to different specs that make them slightly slower, but for some weird reason, NASCAR lets the big-time drivers join the race where, at least here, the big names (Kyle Busch in this case) often win. The race was unbelievably exciting, even though it fueled the animosity NASCAR fans direct at Busch. Bush and his teammate, Daniel Hemric, had been neck and neck for most of the race. With just 7 laps to go, Busch “bumped” Hemric, who was leading at the time, sending Hemric into the wall and giving Busch the win. Both drivers say the “bump” was accidental, and Busch apologized over the team radio after the contact, then again after capturing the checkered flag — going so far as to call the victory “somber.” “People would say I did it on purpose, but what do I need to do it on purpose for,” Busch said in a post-race interview. “Kid’s going for his first win. I’m going for 102. I’ve been there, done that. I don’t need it. It would certainly help him a hell of a lot more than it’s going to help me and give the perception that now I have on that.” Accident or not, we heard a few comments like, “Figures. Busch would bump his own mother.”

We had been told about, but failed to appreciate, what to expect when 40 high-performance cars, all sans mufflers, fire up and drive around the track at top speeds around 180-190 mph. The sound levels are just short of 120 decibels at the track. To put that in perspective, anything over 85 decibels is harmful, a chain saw operates at 105 decibels, and pain begins at 125 decibels. So, standing trackside and temporarily removing my ear plugs caused tears to start welling up in my eyes and my fillings to pop out. But more than “hearing” the sound, one “feels” it. The sound levels are so high that the air throbs and one’s bones vibrate as the cars go by. Combine that with cars going so fast that they are just a blur, the the physical experience is unlike anything we’ve ever experienced short of the Oshkosh fighter-jet fly-bys.

But Sunday was the big momma race, the Quaker State 400. And once again the race had an exciting finish, and once again it involved Kyle Busch. Only this time, he didn’t bump anyone, and the race to the finish was against his older brother, Kurt. And Kurt won. What was amazing about this race, though, was that the cars were faster, and the noise louder, and the competition more fierce, than what we had seen the previous day. In part, that’s because the drivers are mostly a step up from the Xfinity series drivers, and at this point in the season the stakes are greater. But there’s also the difference in the cars. The cars, offered by Toyota, Ford, and Chevrolet, are supposedly look-alikes to their street-legal cousins. Maybe, or maybe not. In any event, even the “low” horsepower engines run at Atlanta Motor Speedway (550 HP), sitting in a 3200-pound car, provide enough juice to go airborne (which cars will do about 205 mph). NASCAR keeps mandating a variety of measures to try to keep speeds down to reasonably safe levels, including the mandatory use of restrictor plates (metal plates in the fuel system to restrict airflow to the engines) (now changed to a tapered spacer), mandatory front and rear spoilers to increase drag, mandatory front-end intakes, and so on, but even with these car-slowing requirements, speeds on the straightaways are still up around 200 mph. In fact, lap times were often less than 30 seconds, meaning the average speed around the entire track was north of 180 mph.

Bottom line: Perhaps the best indicator of how this trip worked out is this: Wendy had to leave half-way through the main race to get home because our stupid dog was being delivered from doggie day care. What did she do when she got home? Turn on the TV to watch the end of the race. Seriously? Wendy? NASCAR? That can only mean that our first (and maybe only) NASCAR experience was a total blast. While I doubt we’ll ever be full-blown NASCAR devotees, if there were some other reason to take ACE to a track, with some NASCAR races added for good measure, we’re in.

One of our favorite kinds of trips is one where we do an RV meetup with family, and if meeting up with family is great, meeting up with family at a national park is even greater. This time it was linking up with Cliff, Ansley, and Margot in Shenandoah National Park. And Shenandoah was a special treat for both families. I had always thought of Shenandoah as mostly a road: a ridgetop highway (Skyline Drive), with the national park being a small ribbon of forest sloping down on either side. Actually, no. The park is over 200,000 acres in size, which means the border on either side of the roadway is MILES wide. And there are over 500 miles of hiking trails, 90 perennial streams, and dozens of waterfalls. So, because we arrived a day ahead of Cliff and the girls, we did our usual thing: went to the visitor center, explained the constituency of our family group, and asked for the best way to spend a few days. Armed with the list the rangers provided, we spent a long weekend of hiking, listening to ranger talks, and hanging around the Big Meadows campground, which involved a considerable amount of dodging wandering cervidae.

We all agreed that the trip was one of the best ever: wonderful campground, beautiful scenery, great ranger talks, fun hikes, lots of activities, and pretty much all we could want.

Including one weirdness: the park is being overrun by gypsy moth caterpillars. Really. Billions of the little wooly buggers. Like many such problems, this one has its roots in human miscalculation. It seems that some Frenchman (it figures), namely one Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, decided in 1869 that he would interbreed the gypsy moth caterpillar with silk worms and, I don’t know, make more French women’s panties or something. In any event, the caterpillars escaped, started to spread, and within 10 years had devastated a huge fraction of the northeast’s hardwood forest. Little by little they’ve been spreading ever since, reaching the Shenandoah National Park in the 1990s. And they are wiping out the park’s population of native oak trees.

It turns out it is possible to eradicate the gypsy moths (as was successfully done in the Pacific Northwest). Unfortunately, though, as one of rangers put it, getting the Park Service to launch a program to kill animals (even invasive ones) requires a long (like, L-O-N-G) approval process. It can be done, though. A little further south in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the hemlock trees are being devastated by the wooly adelgid. There, though, the Park Service has launched an extermination program involving not only chemical controls but even “predatory beetles.” So far, those results are encouraging. Whether the Park Service can jump through its bureaucratic hoops before the Shenandoah oak trees are gone remains to be seen.

We’ve decided that because Shenandoah National Park is only a half-day drive from Cliff’s location, it’ll be a great spot for periodic get-togethers. We’ll be back soon.

March saw us making a quick trip down to Tampa for a family celebration. Technically, I suppose, it counts as an RV trip since we drove ACE down there and stayed at the Lazy Days RV campground, but really the trip had nothing to do with RV’ing. Instead it was a celebration of son #2’s promotion to Lieutenant Colonel.

Being promoted to Lieutenant Colonel is actually a pretty big deal. Nearly all Army officers who hang around for four years make it to Captain, which is the highest of the “company grade” officers, but at the next level, Major (the start of “field grade” officers), things start to thin out. The Army has about 80,000 officers (excluding Generals, of which there are only a couple hundred), but only about 13,000 are Lieutenant Colonels or Colonels.

Anyway, we’re headed back to Walt Disney World and Fort Wilderness in a couple weeks for an impromptu family reunion, so the next post will be about actual RVing stuff. Until then, though, well done, Robert … you make us proud.

We’re in the midst of planning several family-gathering RV trips (including one to Fort Wilderness, the location of the defining broken arm moment exactly one year ago), so we found ourselves antsy to get back into the motorhome and head out somewhere. Anywhere. So, with a break in the grey days of January, it was off to Laura S. Walker State Park for a visit to the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. Which brings a question to mind: why drive 5 hours to see a swamp? It is, well, a swamp. And it’s winter, which means (beside, mercifully, no bugs) no wildlife. And of the area’s 350,000 acres, most are accessible only by canoe, which is off the list for Wendy, who views canoe trips into a swamp as the equivalent of sitting upright in a coffin for day, with added prospects of either drowning or being eaten by an alligator. So, why? Besides being Pogo’s home, is there any reason to visit a swamp?

Yes — this is a great place and we had a wonderful time. Staying in Laura Walker State Park is, like every other Georgia state park, wonderful in and of itself. The campground is perfect, the restrooms are immaculate, and the amenities abundant and worthwhile. We spent our first afternoon there enjoying one of the park’s nature trails that wanders around through the pine forest, with placards placed regularly along the trailside describing the wildlife of the area (none of which we saw, which makes the placards somehow simultaneously irrelevant and necessary) (whatever that means).

But the highlight, as improbable as it may seem, was in fact the swamp. The Okefenokee National Wildlife refuge was established in 1937, back in the good old days when the government, if it wanted to protect nature, actually purchased the land, rather than regulating it into non-use, (thereby sidestepping that pesky little fifth amendment and taking the land without actually having to pay for it). Where was I? Oh yeah … established in 1937. Since we only had a day, and since the best (and only) portion of the area accessible by car is through the east entrance, it was down through Folkston and into the east side we went.

First, a little background about the swamp itself. To start off with, it’s not technically a swamp, it’s a “blackwater wetland” and in fact the largest such wetland in the United States. But it sure looks like swamp, and I suspect “blackwater wetland” is a euphemism for “swamp” foisted on us by activists who think “wetland” connotes something more than “swamp.” Interestingly enough, the swamp is the headwaters of two separate rivers: the Suwanee (which flows into the Gulf) and the St. Mary’s (which does its best to separate Georgia from Florida and then flows into the Atlantic). And the name, “Okefenokee,” is some English version of some Indian word that means “land of trembling earth,” apparently referring to the fact that a large part of the swamp consists of semi-floating masses of peat that shake when you walk on them.

Besides the Indians who used to live here, there were actually a fair number of early pioneers (who must have been really tough dudes), who settled in the area. And actually, their habitations looks a lot better than what you might expect by watching reruns of Swamp People on the Discovery Channel.

Back to the trails. Just inside the entrance is the “Canal Diggers Trail.” Get this. In the 1890s, some dufus came up with idea of “draining the swamp.” (It was the other dufus.) To do this, he tried to dig a canal but ran into two obvious (to me) problems: First, there are billions of gallons of water in the swamp and even if one could drain some portion of the area, water would keep flowing back in. Actually, at one point the “drainage” canal actually began to collect water and refill the swamp. Oops. Second, the whole area consists of sand, which means when you try to excavate a ditch, it has a tendency to collapse back in on itself. So, after a few years of trying, and a well-deserved bankruptcy, the project was abandoned. So, for now, the location of that failed effort makes a really interesting short hike.

The other trail we most enjoyed is actually a 3/4-mile boardwalk (!) to an observation tower.

So, 8 hours (and 11,000 steps) later, we finished the Swamp Island drive. It’s a real compliment to the experience that Wendy, who is about the least swampish person I can imagine, had a great time and was glad to have spent the day in a swamp!

There are two kinds of winds that come out of thunderstorms: tornados and derechos. We know that we don’t want to be in the first; this trip gave us to opportunity to learn we also don’t want to be in the second.

The original plan, the one that involved “seeing” Montana in four days (ha ha), had us leaving Livingston on August 8, which would put us crossing Nebraska and Iowa on August 9th and 10th. That would have been a bad thing. On the night of August 9th, a derecho, which is an area of straight-line winds blasting out from a line of thunderstorms (from the Spanish word meaning “right” or “straight”), blew across the Midwest. This particular storm, incredibly, was a line of severe thunderstorms 600 miles long. Ahead of that fearsome monster were straight-line winds of at least 58 mph across essentially the entire front, and winds clocked in Iowa in excess of 110 mph. All across the area, roofs were torn off of buildings, trees were uprooted, semi tractor trailers were blown over, grain elevators were toppled, and thousands of acres of corn fields were flattened. At one point, power had been knocked out to nearly one million homes. The effect was essentially an inland Category 2 hurricane, spreading the same kind of destruction, except that unlike a hurricane, this one didn’t lose force over land, it gained it. Our route would have put us right in the middle of all this on the very night it happened.

But, as it turns out, we were miles away. Since we decided we are basically morons for thinking we’d see Montana in four days, and having resolved to come back to Montana for a month next year, we realized we might as well get a head start on the trip home and leave on August 7th. That meant, instead of spending the night of August 9-10 in Nebraska, in the middle of unimaginable destruction, we were 300 miles southeast, watching on network news the devastation occurring in where we would have been had we left per our original schedule.

I assume that, had we been in the jaws of this beast when it hit, we would have taken shelter in the campground bathroom building, or some other suitable shelter, but the RV likely would have been damaged, maybe totaled. Instead, it’s just a story of what might have been. We’re pretty much devoted Presbyterians, so we don’t believe in luck or coincidence. But whatever you call it, providence or luck, but for a spontaneous decision to leave a day early, this would have been an entirely different post.