Girly Gatlingburg

I know I keep making excuses for my infrequent posts, but here in the next week or two I will be able to give you a literal big excuse. And you will be all like, "Holy crap!" In the mean-time, cut me some slack, yo!

While James worked on the house all this weekend (painting the trim around our fancy new doors, re-caulking around the windows, and dragging all of his tools from places I didn't even know he kept them into the living room), I spent the whole weekend soaking up some quality girl time in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. He must have been a little bit bored without me because he even did all of our laundry. It isn't folded and it is in a giant pile in the middle of our bed... but at least it is clean. Baby steps.

So eight of us lady-folks headed a little further south to celebrate the first weekend of fall tucked into a log cabin in the Smoky Mountains.

We set off from Louisville after work on Friday, a little bit later than expected... but that is also attributable to this big excuse you are anticipating. We met up with our other unit in Lexington, redistributed our luggage, and then made the 3.5 drive into Appalachia. We arrived just barely before midnight and were able to skim through the gated entrance to our community by about 3 minutes before close. We unpacked, popped open a few bottles of wine, and caught up.

Around five hours later, chlorine soaked from the hot tub, weary from the work week and the drive, we finally hit the hay.

We started Saturday morning off with coffee and tea on the porch, then transitioned to mimosas and fruit before we took off for the strip. If any of you have ever been to Gatlinburg, you know what to picture here: lots of lights, tourists jamming the streets, traffic that seems impossible for such a small place so far away from anything relevant, any kind of tacky gift you have ever seen advertised on TV, and, of course, old-timey photo shops. If any of you haven't been... well, I just described it to you. It is basically like God sprinkled a bunch of glitter and garbage on the mountains and it all ran downhill into this one little crack. I mean that in the most charming way possible.

We ate lunch and watched the U of L score tick across the screens at the Brewery. Chanted when we saw the final score (72-0 for those of you blatantly unaware of Teddy Bridgewater and his badassedness), and had an all-around good time.

After lunch we walked down to the Ol Smoky Moonshine distillery tasting room. Room is an understatement. This was a mall of mason jars. We all lined up at the bar and worked our way through all 12 of the different flavors of moonshine available. The first: your regular old farm-party style corn whiskey. After mimosas and a huge mug of beer I just about tapped out right then and there. If you haven't had moonshine, well, just image what something you would clean your toilet with would taste like... or that corn based fuel... yes... that is probably more accurate. Imagine a big swig of ethanol. Yee-haw! I think four of my teeth fell out, my shoes disintegrated, and an infant appeared on my hip with just that one toss.

Apple pie, blueberry, peach, strawberry, and lemon drop later we tried a moonshine cherry. Yup. A maraschino cherry that had been stewing in a jar of shine almost it's whole short life. Now, I have had cherries soaked in bourbon and covered in chocolate before and that was terrific. Moonshine is a different story. I tossed that cherry into my mouth and hated my life for the next 5 minutes. The juices burned and, unlike a regular shot, you were forced to sit and chew your liquor for way too long. No matter what you did you could not chew fast enough. Luckily the cherry was towards the end of our tour and we could quickly leave and wash our mouths out with beer from one of the restaurants upstairs.

When we had done everything we could do in downtown Gatlinburg on a rainy day, we trekked up the mountains back to our cabin in the woods. I cooked up a big pot of chili, we sipped wine, and relaxed.

We weren't able to hike or shop, due to the weather, but we had a great time enjoying each other's company and escaping the stresses of everyday life. It is a trip I look forward to every year, as a time when you can sit back and imagine that one day you, too, may have your own cabin that people rent out when you are too busy traveling the world to stay there. Anyways, you can never go wrong when you bring 8 girls into the hills with all the wine your car can carry.