Further south

Before we left the Smoky Mountains area, we travelled a fair bit of the Foothills Parkway – at least a fair bit of what has been completed. In 1944, Congress set aside funds to acquire the right of way for the Foothills Parkway, a route much like the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Skyline Drive we had been on for a bunch of our trip. However, the will must not have been as great – today, only about half of the right of way has been completed, with no definite ending date in sight. If ever completed, it will be a bit over 70 miles long, along the Tennessee River in the west, and the Pidgeon River in the east.

We did manage to get in just a glimpse of what the Woman had originally scheduled to come here for. While in most of the National Park where we hiked, there were some emerging yellows and oranges. However, on this section of the Foothills Parkway we saw fall colors on their way to their peak. Awesome!

It turned out that it was the Woman’s birthday today, and we were in driving distance of Gus’s. Nick had first introduced us to Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken when we met up with he and Valerie in Memphis – the original site for Gus’s. Since Colectiva was parked only a half hour away, we had a special birthday dinner at Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken.

On the way to Atlanta, we maneuvered a stop in Cleveland Tennessee. We headed to the Museum Center to see the Cherokee Chieftain, the 9^th Whispering Giant carved by Peter Wolf Toth, and dedicated to the city of Cleveland in 1974. We hadn’t seen the worry lines on the brow, or the bags under the eyes in any of the Whispering Giants we had witnessed to date.

We were heading to a suburb north of Atlanta to see the Woman’s uncle Fred Hodoval. We had arranged that we would have lunch at his assisted care center tomorrow, and also spend some time with the Woman’s cousins Scott and Jodi. However, we got a message that Fred passed this morning, so we won’t have the family gathering we were looking forward to. The Woman was still able to get together with Scott and Jodi, but the mood was a bit more somber than we had planned for.

Talk to you soon.