Road Trip 2018 - Day Twenty One, Appilachian Wanderings

No pictures today...not that I didn't take them, but we are at a hotel with excruciatingly slow internet. So hopefully at tomorrow's stop I will be able to get the loaded.

We headed out from Chattanooga today towards the Northeastern part of Tennessee. We've decided we want to be out of cities for a while and focus on smaller places on the road and the countryside. This has led us to the section of Tennessee that is really a part of Appalachia.

Heading East-Northeast we entered the Cherokee National Forest and came to the tiny town of Reliance. There was his old time gas station/general store/post office there. We stopped to take some pictures when the proprietor came out. What followed was a good 45 minutes of history. His family dates back to the mid to late 1800's. He told of its original growth as a mill location, of the original founder, big landowner, Hodgson, who initially developed the location, of the coming of the railroad, of his family, the Webb's who took over the crossroads and the decline over the 20th century. He had a mini-museum with such neat things as the original appointment of the post office and one of Hodgson's original land titles.

Fortified with history we delved deep into the mountain roads in search of fall colors. We stopped for lunch at a town called Tellico Plains we'd researched (as one of the Top 15 small towns in Tennessee). We had lunch at the Tellicafe along with a slew of bikers. In fact the roads we took into the mountains are incredibly popular with the biking crowd.

After lunch we did some photo shooting in the old part of town and then head into the mountains. Now during this whole time, I don't have cell phone connection so no data. There was WiFi at the restaurant so I was able to make a hotel reservation for the night. But other than that we were navigating old style with maps.

We had not seen any fall color to date, but at the highest altitudes, we were rewarded with some. But man the driving was tough with never ending switch backs over some 100 miles. We actually ended up going into North Carolina and then came back into Tennessee.  We didn't get to our hotel until much later than we thought because of the slowness of the driving. Fortunately we did get cell back at the very end as we returned to civilization or we would never have found the hotel.

Hopefully tomorrow will give us better internet and I will get the pictures posted.