Here is a shot I took on the sidewalk in Gatlinburg. I saw it and walked right on by. Then I snapped to attention and thought, REMEMBER when you saw the Sponge Bob Popsicle on the ground melting and you did not shoot it? DUH. So I circled back around and took this shot.....poor kid.
I grew up HOT in the deepest part of the deep south. To cross Lake PONTCHARTRAIN was cooling enough, but to continue all the way to Tennessee and up a mountain to boot, was enough to make me come unglued. And when I was a kid, commercialization was NOT a bad thing. I could walk around the Rebel Corner souvenir business for hours, (never mind that I likely only had minutes), driving anywhere was an amazing visual feast...There were bears, Indians, hillbillies, fresh mountain morning air, the smell of tent canvas, a limited amount of clean clothes, lol. The fresh, moist mountain air. Individual Kellogg's cereal boxes carefully slit open with a knife to make a camping cereal bowl....CHIPMUNKS. My sisters, who as any young boy knows, would daily go from tormentor to loved one and back several times a day. We were all trapped in this place of beauty where our schedule was mostly out of our hands, with all these alluring things to do and buy, and not really having a chance to be a classic tourist with deep pockets. We enjoyed our trips on a dime and in truth, our parents let us spend a short amount of time on each trip at least pretending we were there to spend money and have a real vacation, at least in the way we imagined everybody else did.
Mountain Golf
So when I get a chance to get to the Smokies with my mother and my sisters and their families, its a pretty special event for me. I only got to review 2 cigars, and to this blog they are both re-runs. I smoked a 2007 Partagas Short and a 2007 Cohiba Maduro Secreto. We will get to them tomorrow.
Grotto falls
We hiked a lot less than usual owing to the rain everyday. But we did manage to make several great hikes, and spent many great picnic lunches in our favorite picnic spots.
The Chimneys Picnic Area
We watched a lot of Olympic coverage, and we ate a lot of great food. My brother-in-law made some fantastic pancakes and waffles most mornings, this being his identified niche skill. My other B.I.L. is the ice cream maker. I am the meat smoker. Jimmy Buffet is the drink maker. My sisters do it all and are the planners. My mother out-hikes me, keeps me from drinking too much with the evil eye, and basically presides over the remaining family with pride and her own enjoyment of the trip.
We also discovered a new machine at the Space Needle Arcade that is really going to help. My sister and I are both Skee-Ball lovers, since we are 50 or so. NEVER has their been such a rip off from a arcade ticket perspective. It's a fun game in and of itself, but if you are looking to get anything more than a whoopee cushion or back scratcher, you'd best find another game. And if not, plan on emptying your wallet. Well by some miracle, I had two straight 60,000 hole-ins go unscored by the machine, I am sure it is a scam, or just an unreported flaw in one machine, (I didn't report it either). But I got so mad that I left to search the arcade for another game to play. I found one that is a TICKET MAKER! I won't say which one, but I have always thought those 'token pusher' games were pretty cool. You have bulldozers, race cars, game show ripoffs, all kinds of ways to push tokens over the cliff and into a scorer that converts tokens pushed into tickets. Well I found one that was just shooting out the tickets for me, and as a result we were able to get a prize SO VALUABLE (lol) that the a prize runner had to be called to the counter to go in the 'back' and get our reclining bear figurine. I am sure the lady was shocked that we did not get a tiny bag of silly bandz and call it a night. A superball and a army man. No we pointed at an item in the "other case"....the LOCKED one. So now that we are clued in, we will play this game on our night on the strip to come home with a memento for Mother to show for our 35 bucks lost down the black hole that is the ticket arcade.
I should have had photos of all this, but my crappy expensive Canon SX1 IS is now a modern art piece of useless metal, glass and plastic. I took it down to gatlinburg when I heard that they were going downtown, and I forgot to take batteries. I could have bought a 4 pack for 50 bucks, lol, but since it was clouding up pretty badly, I left the camera in the car. Little did I know, I should have bought the batteries. It would have likely prevented what happened to me with it a few days later. I ended up getting a "lens error, restart camera", and the camera is out of warranty, and this error is SO WIDESPREAD in Canon cameras that Canon has retreated to lawyers and well-trained customer service reps who deny everything as their response for people, tens of thousands so far, who have also had this error out of the blue. This was supposed to be the supercamera that was going to supplant the workhorse S5 IS.
Piece of crap.
Tremont before the swim
On a side note, I was crossing a Tremont stream to shoot some photos, slipped on a rock and went up to my neck in water with my S5 IS underwater in my hand. Above you can see the last photo I took before going in for the big swim. I simply took out the batteries, opened all the doors and hatches, dried it out for two days, and it fired right up. So while I am out 700 bucks worth of SX1 IS camera (paid 270), at least I still have SOME kind of superzoom left over, my S5 IS. What a camera...to go through the water and still work fine.
I will say "stay tuned for it", but eventually the post will appear ABOVE this one, so it's a bit weird to say it, but I will have another Smokies collection of photos and the second cigar review,
the Partagas Short, all coming later this week.
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