America 2015: Day Twenty-Five (23 August 2015)

Hey welcome to the Southland,
open up a beer can, crank up the Hank, the Haggard, and Waylon.
Yeah, that’s how we do it down home.
Were little bit backwards here in the backwoods, who cares as long as it feels good.
Y’all come back now when you can,
To the Southland.

                                                                                                                   - Zane Lewis

Sunday 23 August

It seems a simple and easy to follow instruction: get to the coach fifty minutes after the race ends. That was the instruction we were given by the people who ran our transport from Knoxville to Bristol Motor Speedway and back. Friday night, we had forty minutes, but the extra ten minutes was a nod to the crowd doubling in size. As it turns out, we made it with twenty minutes to spare. We were one of the last people to get on the bus 11:10pm. I nodded off, expecting to wake up when we were somewhere on the road back to Knoxville.

Well, I was in for some disappointment. See, I woke up at just after midnight…to find that we were still sitting in the parking lot at Bristol. We were the only bus left, and traffic was streaming out on both sides. It turned out that two folks were missing. They’d had the best part of two hours to get back to the bus, and hadn’t.

Now, let me tell you, there were some tired, drunk and very unhappy fans on the bus, many of whom questioned why there were rules if the bus waited for people who were late, anyway. At that point, I tended to agree with them. I mean, we left as soon as they threw the checkers, missing the victory lane celebration because we didn’t want to be the ones slowing down our departure. Turns out, we needn’t have been so worried.

When the missing pair finally what returned to the bus, armed with precious little in the way of an excuse for being more than an hour later than the cut-off time, they weren’t exactly greeted with open arms by most people. In fact, it’s fair to say there was a serious amount of resentment. And a bit of a cheer when we finally pulled out of the Bristol lot.

Despite my fears, we moved fairly cleanly through the traffic, and ended up getting back into Knoxville at just after 2:30am. Just as well we didn’t have to get up early and check out, as many of the people who were on the same race package as we are were doing. I can only imagine how dusty they were feeling after a long and noisy day at the track, followed by a 2:30am arrival home, and a mid-morning check out. Ouch!

Until sleeping until around 10:30am, it was a late breakfast in a dining room that was significantly less busy than it had been since Friday morning, and then we drove out to Pigeon Forge, a small and very beautiful township in the mountains, near the Dollywood theme park. Yep, Dolly Parton has her own theme park…and now a water park, too.

The entire Great Smoky Mountain Range is really something to see. The scenery in this neck of the woods is beyond belief. In the wintertime, the mountains are popular for skiing, but in summer, the climate is just perfect, and zip lining is the thing to do.

Smoky Mountain Zip Line has more than eighteen different lines on their property, including some giant ones that were unfortunately close for safety reasons – it had been raining earlier in the day – but we still got to do a nine-line tour, which starts off with you jumping into the back of an old military truck for a very steep ride to the top of one of the smaller peaks on the property.

From the top, you complete the nine lines, each one longer and faster than the one before, and eventually end up somewhere near the bottom. Unlike the zip line at Ruby Falls in Chattanooga, you actually wear gloves, and slow down near the end of each line by clamping down on the cable. It seems more dangerous than it actually is, and you obviously brake less if you want a faster ride.

There are few things more fun than coming in real hot to the platform, and then stopping suddenly when the carabiner trolley that’s dragged you across four hundred foot of line reaches the end. On one line, we were asked to keep our hands off the cable, so that we could spin around in circles as we went across. That was fun!

Unfortunately, we couldn’t take any photos because the company asks that you leave all your valuables behind for safety reasons. It was an awesome afternoon, though!

Tomorrow we leave Tennessee and head for South Carolina!