Last Saturday I posted some notes and a picture from last week's trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Above are a couple more pictures taken during one of our walks in downtown Gatlinburg. I took the picture of the ladies above. Left to right are Nancy's cousin Becky, Nancy's sister Elaine, and Nancy. In turn, as we waited to cross the street to our cars, Nancy took the picture of the guys. Again, left to right, are Becky's husband Orville, Elaine's husband Karl, and Nancy's husband, me.

We all drove to our homes in Michigan (Karl and Elaine), Pennsylvania (Becky and Orville), and Alabama (Nancy and me) last Saturday. While the others drove straight north out of Pigeon Forge, we turned left as usual onto Route 321 at stoplight 3 in Pigeon Forge to avoid having to drive through Knoxville. Well, this time I programmed the navigator in the car to take us on the shortest route over to Lenoir City and I-75, and we ended up driving the back road I traced in black on the map above. I assure you that to even see and trace the road, I had to reduce the scale on this map to 1 inch equals 0.4 of a mile! The scale on the map above was 1 inch equals 3 miles.

That back road was an interesting drive. It started out OK. A 2-lane road with a painted center line, which indicated that there was NEVER a safe place to pass. The road wound around hills and through valleys; lots of twists and turns. About two-thirds of the way through, we saw a sign we really could have done without. It wasn't a "detour" sign, although we did see one of those. I ignored it deciding instead that the detour was to keep heavy trucks off the bridge we crossed a few minutes later. No. The sign we didn't want to see said, "Road Narrows". And sure enough, it did narrow to about a lane and a half with no center line. Luckily, for that part of the drive, we only met a few cars. For Nancy the most interesting thing was that, all along the road, were big houses with gated driveways. I did, however, occasionally hear her humming the theme from Deliverance.

So what did we save? According to the trace I made above, the total distance on that back road was 14.6 miles. Staying on 321 was 19.8 miles to the same intersection. 5.2 miles. A little less than a quart of gasoline. But, now we know better.