BLOGGED AFTER THE FACT: AN APPALACHIAN ADVENTURE PART II

 On Saturday morning, we got up and met in the lobby for breakfast. I learned fast and quick who the moms were a chaperone for the church group staying in our hotel, because I made a joke about a gay bar in Denver and got a look of death from the lady in the next table. It wasn't even that bad of a joke! Maybe she needed to mind her own business. 

The first thing we did was go to Ober Gatlinburg, which is a sort of winter sports complex/shopping area  that you can get to by riding a massive gondola up the mountain. You can also drive, but where is the fun in that? We got there fairly early, which was good, because there were a lot of people in the boarding area. So many in fact, that I had to take one of my e-stop anxiety pills because I came very close to losing my biscuits, screaming, and clawing my way through a group of young people wearing ski pants to get out! Luckily, I managed to get all the way there without getting the screaming meemies and we had a good time! It was a lot colder up there than we thought it would be! Steve wanted to do something called an Alpine Slide, but it was closed, and since we didn't know how to ski or ice skate, we spent that time going up another level  on a ski lift to a scenic overlook where we could see everything! Well, maybe not everything, but a lot!  Poor Anthony, we didn't know he was scared of heights until then. Oops. 

We looked around the place for a while, and even went to see some rescue animals that are in a kind of permanent rehab kind of habitat. It wasn't the best quality place, but the animals can't be let back out into the wild because they have been injured or have some other types of problems, so I'm glad that they can be safe there. The bears were in their dens, but we did get to see some raccoons, possums, birds of prey, and otters! I love otters! At least I used to. These were cute, though, and we got to see them being fed. They were sweet.

After we left Ober Gatlinburg, we went back down to the town to get lunch. We had some good timing and managed to get into a pretty nice place near our hotel before the crowds came in. 

PAUSE: I suppose I should explain my eating situation, though, so I can stop saying that I'll explain it all later. Eating, for me, is no longer fun. I can eat, but not very much, and I am supposed to eat certain kinds of things for the next few months. I am not feeling sorry for myself here, because I did sign up for this, but it sucks because eating while on vacation is usually part of the fun. Now, mostly, I just feel sick and full after a few bites. Add to that that I can't really order what I normally would, so even the food I do get to eat is not really what I want. Eating is no longer a satisfying activity, and I had to get up and leave from a restaurant more than once just to walk around so my food could settle. It made me feel bad, because I never wanted to affect anyone else with the choice I made to have the surgery, but I kept having to leave Anthony and Steve to go back to the room because eating made me feel so bad. I don't care that I physically felt bad, but I hated that it affected them.

Anyway, enough about that. After lunch, I went back to the room to lie down while Steve and Anthony walked up and down the main street, visiting the places all along the strip and shopping and whatnot. They had fun, though! They came back to the hotel to rest up a bit before we left again that evening. We were going into Pigeon Forge to go to Cooter's store, and to have dinner at a place our former pastor told me we should go to! 

I don't know what was going on, but it took us nearly an hour just to get out of Gatlinburg proper so that we could get into Pigeon Forge. Also, the traffic was so bad that we had to take an alternate route to get to Cooter's, and we still almost got there too late. Steve and Anthony had a good time looking at all of the Dukes of Hazzard memorabilia, but we weren't able to stay very long. We drove over to the all year Christmas store and looked around a while, and then decided we wanted to see if we could get into our dinner early. We had a reservation at 8:00 PM, but we figured that we might eat earlier so we could get back to Gatlinburg before it was late. Boy, were we wrong. We couldn't even find a parking spot at the restaurant when we got there, people were parking in the grass around the building, and people were lined up outside in the freezing cold just to get in. We figured we might go someplace else and go back closer to the time of our reservation, but traffic by that point was so bad that we got suck in it for a concerning amount of time. We finally just went back to the restaurant, waited for someone to leave a spot, and we sat outside for an hour in the car until it was time to go inside. I'm so grateful we made a reservation, because the wait was routinely an hour and a half for people just walking in. We finally got seated, and had a good time! Steve and Anthony said the food and drinks were really good!

By the time we left, traffic had let up a bit, and we went back to the hotel. I feel like we had an extremely long day of doing stuff, but when I write it out, it doesn't look like much at all. Huh.

Eh, well, it was still a very fun day!