On The Road...Again

Most of my time on this vacation was spent driving. We drove three hours to Festus, spent a day, and then drove six hours to Louisville, and spent a day, and today we set out for yet another road trip, this time to Gatlinburg, TN, or, the "Redneck Riviera" as one of our friends from the area put it. I wasn’t exactly sure how to get there from Louisville, so I MapQuested it, got directions, and was told that it would take about 4.5 hours to get there. I figured that wouldn’t be bad – as we could get there early in the day & buzz around before turning in for the night. However, Mapquest failed to mention anything about construction. That, along with traffic, rush hour Knoxville, and bumper to bumper traffic in both Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, made that 4.5 hour trip into a seven hour trip. Needless to say, by the time we made it to the hotel, the last thing I wanted to do was go out to do anything. My wife finally convinced me to go and walk down to a nearby restaurant, a Corkey’s barbecue place. It was quite good, but in Gatlinburg, I quickly found that the pedestrian traffic, somehow, is even worse that the vehicular traffic.