Smokies!

Today we moved on to Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP), the most visited national park in the US. I've been looking forward to seeing the Smokies for a long time. I was born in New Bern, North Carolina, which is in the eastern side of the state but have never made it to the western half.

On the route there we drove along US19, which descends steeply. We've been relying heavily on the transmission to slow us on the downhills (to spare the brakes). This tactic has served us well, but suddenly we heard an alarming "ding-ding-ding-ding" from the truck, along with the warning message that the transmission was overheating and we needed to idle the engine. But where? The road was narrow and winding, with no shoulders and no place to turn off. A few miles down the road we found a business on the left and pulled in parallel to the road.

Once we were able to idle the engine, the transmission temp came down rapidly from its high at 245 degrees. However we were blocking patrons and had to move on. We made it the rest of the way without further problems, monitoring the transmission temp the whole way.

We were very glad when we came to the Oconaluftee Visitor Center in Cherokee, NC. We stopped to pick up some park information and then headed to our campground, Smokemont, just up the road.

We were in site #21, right on the river, a delightful spot.

We set up and then walked around the campground to explore. Some wild turkeys were wandering through, paying little attention to us.

We sat down to plan some hiking and exploring for the days to come. We were entirely off the grid: no electricity, no water hookup, no sewer, and more importantly, no cellphone and no Internet. We were parked in the shade, so our solar panels weren't any help. We had to rely on our little Honda generator to recharge our batteries, so we were extremely conservative in our use of electricity.