Day 10 and 11 - On the Road home...Home

We departed our Great Smokies campsite about 8:30AM hoping to make it to at least PA this evening, at least 500 miles. Everyone comes down with "get-home-idis" around this time, but despite this I wanted to drive the historic route 73 through the park, it is about 20 miles of switch backs that follow the little river but is very scenic.  There are places where the road is cut into a cliff or under it where we had to be careful with our tall vehicles, some others left chunks in the road where they scraped the wall....we wanted no part of that.

It was a nice drive that eventually turn north to head up through Pigeon Forge, a tourist town where Dollywood can be visited. If you are into bumper cars, water slides and the like...Pigeon Forge is your place, it makes Lake George, NY look amateur in scale.

Tom really wanted to tour Dollywood but we had to move on.
















When we left Tennessee there was one more stop that Tom felt was necessary....Foamhenge. This is located in Natural Bridge, VA and you have to know it is there or you will never find it. Somehow Tom knew about it so we had to stop.

It is a pretty good replication of the original which took 1500 years and 1000 men to complete.  This one took 6 weeks, 4-5 Mexicans and one crazy white man to construct.

It is corny but pretty cool too.










After Foamhenge we pressed on and made it to Maryland, just a bit short of what we planned, but we had about 500 miles behind us and 500 in front of us. We pulled into a Cracker Barrel in Hagerstown, Maryland and had a good meal.

When we awoke in the morning it was 31F so we knew we were getting close to home.  We hit PA and that nasty white stuff...there was a strong pull to do a 180 and head south but we pressed on for home.

We arrived home about 7PM to a pretty nice sunset...it was 36F, cold but there is something that feels good about being home.














Overall it was a good trip, we traveled 2928 miles in just over 10 days, we had no mechanical issues and overall we successfully avoided the heavy traffic in the cites.

It would have been nice to have more time but we made the most of the time we had. The wedding was spectacular, the Smokies were stunning and visiting friends in DC and family in GA was priceless, to use a worn out phrase.