I found Disneyland Down South

Location: Smokey Mountains, TN

I got frustrated today. I got angry. I yelled and cursed and frowned and drove aggressively and shook my head and said fuck at least a couple of dozen times.

The Exodus is not all butterflies and rainbows after all. And that brings me back to one of my primary points: that you cant control the world.

Today, I felt myself trying to do that, and that’s when all the yelling and fucks occurred. Usually when I run into a frustrating situation, I usually do the "it is what it is " shoulder shrug and then make the most of it.

But not when it comes to riding my bike. I was really really excited about riding my bike today.


I had what I thought was a good plan to drive about 50 minutes south to Gatlinburg, TN. I would park and then have a lovely and epic ride up to Clingmans Dome, which is at 6,700 feet or close to it. It would be 20 miles up with a total of 5,800ft of climbing and then a blissful 20 miles straight back down.

I had only done this kind of ride once, when I climbed Mt. Washington in New Hampshire back in 1986, which is still not even close to the scale of 300ft per mile.

I’ll sum it up: this place is a tourist trap. It’s the Las Vegas of mountain towns. It’s a bit ugly to be honest. I will say no more because there are people who clearly love this place, and apparently they all decided that October 22nd, 2011 was the day to display that love. It took me close to 3 hours in bumper to bumper traffic. I don’t want to poo poo a single thing. But I could have done with about 5,000 less cars and about 500 less dinner show theaters, Titanic replica water parks, Dollywoods, Nascar race parks, Indoor Sky Diving, Christmas Bonanza’s, helicopter rides, chain restaurants, and the worlds biggest knife museums. Hey-zues-Christo.

I might have seen the silly side if not for the traffic.

Off to Chattanooga tomorrow.

I tried to turn a negative in to a positive in this video. Let me know how I did!