A few hours in the life...

[fenchurch]

In my desire to be as over-prepared as possible for my trip to visit nmissi and to attend GenCon/JadeCon in August, I was just looking at how long it would take to drive from Charlotte, NC (where I have a layover and plane switch) to Louisville, in the event that my flight out got canceled due to cutbacks or for some other reason. (Yes, I do tend to overplan for these sorts of things... but if I don't check into the possibilities, it'll sit in the back of my brain and bug me until I do.)

Not too bad. Estimated about 7-8 hours driving... and, even better, the route would take me right by Cades Cove, TN aka ancestral home to one side of my family (well, after they moved there from Scotland) -- my great-grandparents left before my grandfather was born, but a bunch of his cousins and their descendants are still there. I've never been to the place, but I've always wanted to see it. So, I'm not about to hope I get stranded in Charlotte or anything, but if I did, well, it wouldn't totally suck to have to rent a car and drive.

In other news, I finally set things up to start using Twitter... only to discover that I live the world's most boring life and have nothing to say. Granted, this is based only on one day's worth of activities, but so far the most exciting or even remotely interesting thing I could have posted was "Just got done using the walking track at the local park, may have slightly overdone it. Ow." Except that by the time I realized I should post it, I was already back home in front of my computer and, well, it didn't seem like the thing to do anymore. I could just see the other possible updates now:
"Walked upstairs to make the bed. Cats followed me."
"Downstairs again to move some laundry through. Cats tagged along. Numfar excited about laundry chore, as always."
"Sitting in front of the computer, trying to decide if I have anything interesting to say on LJ. Cats perched nearby waiting for me to walk to another room."

And so on.

On the plus side, shortly after I set things up to send text messages to Twitter from my phone, it occurred to me that I could do it just as easily from the web interface on my phone and not have to worry about using too many of my text messages each month (I have a lot, but I could see where Twitter would easily use them all if I let it).

Comments

[wisemack.livejournal.com]

Oh, my! Cades Cove has for years been one of my favorite places in the world - so beautiful and peaceful, with the mountains surrounding it. Plus, the cornmeal that's ground at the old water-powered grist mill at the end of the valley, makes the absolutely best cornbread. (You do have to watch out for large chunks of corn kernel, though.)

And are you kin to the Oliver family? I know that John Oliver and his wife were the first settlers in the Cove, and I actually met their g'g'great-grandson who was a fellow student at Millsaps back in the Dark Ages (aka 1968).

[fenchurche.livejournal.com]

Wow! I have to admit, I wasn't expecting anyone to have ever even heard of Cades Cove, much less have been there!

As for the Oliver family, yes... I believe I am (or at least I remember seeing the last name popping up in my genealogy). From what I understand, pretty much all the families there are inter-related, especially if they were in the area pre-1900.

[wisemack.livejournal.com]

Eeeep! I almost missed this - sorry!

I've been to Cades Cove several times back in the day, because it's only just over the mountains from Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge, but seems a million miles away from the touristy commercialization of those formerly nice little mountain communities. My mom was especially fond of the place, although my dad could never be convinced to drive the motor home over that very twisting, winding road through the Great Smokies for a stay in the CC campground, so we only made day trips. But the drive is worth it just for the scenery, where a rocky mountain stream parallels the road for most of the trip, ending in a place called - IIRC - the Sinkholes, where I remember leaping around on the huge boulders with the girls and enjoying the cool spray as the water crashed down around us.

And that cornmeal! My parents used to bring back sacks of the stuff and keep 'em in the freezer but after my mom died, my dad stopped making any long trips so I was reduced to making a phone call to the ranger station at Great Smoky National Park! The nice ranger who answered the phone said, yes, if I'd send money, they'd be delighted to send me bags of cornmeal. And daddy, bless his heart, said that made for the most expensive cornbread ever, but I figured it if made him happy, it was worth the hassle.

And yeah, the Olivers were probably related to the other families in the Cove, in part because it was such a remote area, with only one road in for many years. So unless a guy was willing to pick up and leave to find a wife, I suspect he might have had a good chance of marrying a cousin. Genealogy... gotta love it!

By the way, my ancestors were living up in that region toward the end of the 18th century, too; specifically, in the Holston and Watauga river valleys. Most of them were Regulators who weren't particularly fond of the King of England, and especially didn't want to be hung as horse thieves --- so they skedaddled over the mountains from the Carolinas (a thing which was strictly forbidden to English colonists) and eventually started their own semi-autonomous community. You can read about some of it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watauga_Association

Cool, huh? ;)