Berries in the Smokeys

Today we finally got around to taking the one hour drive to get to the Smokey Mountains. The mountains were indeed smokey:


(those blurry spots are insects)



Other minor highlights (for major highlight, see below):
1) The woods were nice and had lots of flowers:



2) We had a picnic in a lovely meadow (though there were a lot of insects who wanted to share our salad):


3) We got our feet wet in the (frigid!) waters of a charming stream;


Now for the major highlight. As soon as we started our hike (along the Forney Ridge trail coming down from Clingmans Dome), we encountered bountiful bushes of very sweet and juicy raspberries. Gina put the first four in her mouth before I could even take the picture:



Further down the trail, we found blackberries and blueberries (all equally sweet):



Although we did hike a bit and have that picnic I talked about, Gina's heart was in the picking of berries (the meadow--site of our picnic--was the "headquarters" (as Gina puts it) of the blueberry trees). Back at home, here's a couple photos of our spoils:


(FYI: that's the edge of my purple bean bag on the bottom of the picture)

Maomao in Knoxville

For those interested, Maomao has very quickly adjusted to his new surroundings. His favorite places to hang out during the day are: 1) inside the bathtub; 2) the top shelf of the hall closet; 3) the top of the bookcase in our bedroom (see below). The bookcase was actually designed just for him. We bought one that would be just high enough for him to look out the window (the window sill in the bedroom is too narrow).

Dissertation and faulty harddrive

It is now official:



For those interested, my dissertation is available in pdf format on my as-of-yet very primitive website:

Nick Tackett's website

The bad news is that this might be the last post for a while. My harddrive crashed several times today...usually I can get it to start working again by striking the front of the computer. Needless to say, I spent the day burning cds.

Quick New York trip

On Monday (Aug 7) we drove up to New York. Actually, we first spent a night with Sarino in Maryland, passing the morning of Aug 8 visiting D.C. (we walked from the capitol to the Lincoln Memorial) and lunch with Janie. Tuesday night we had an excellent dinner (as usual) at GSE with Chris & Isaac. Wednesday, I turned in the final copy of my dissertation and loaded up the car with my TV and dvd player, stored in my old apartment (under Andy's supervision), as well as stuff I had left with Tiffany and Cordy. And Thursday we drove back to Knoxville (in one day) stopping in the morning at my cousin's to fill up all remaining space in the car with books I had left in her attic. We got back to Knoxville at 2 am.

Atlanta

To backtrack: We arrived in Knoxville on Aug 1 which was a Tuesday. On Thursday we drove to Atlanta to get furniture at IKEA, stuff at Crate&Barrel (where we had a gift certificate), and stock up on groceries in Chinatown. We had some difficulty getting the bed back to Knoxville. The box containing the head of the bed did not fit into the car and so I spent about an hour tying it to the roof. I soon realized that the flat box was acting sort of like a sail and was destined to flip up (and off the car) if it stayed on top. We started taking apart the box (initially so I could cut holes in the box to make it a less effective sail), but then discovered the contents were quite a bit smaller than the box and with a lot of effort (including moving the front seats back and forth), we were able to get it into the car. This process took another hour. The inside of the car ended up looking like this:



Including the eight hours of driving to get to Atlanta and back, it was quite a long day...

Fishing and lots of driving

Here's a summary of the rest of the trip:

On our second day in Woodland Park (that would be last Saturday, July 29), we spent much of the day fishing. We went to Lake Manitou right outside of town. It was very hot, but a lovely setting:



Nobody was having much luck, though Gina did catch a few crayfish. At the very end of the afternoon, just as we were about to leave, Gina reeled in a sucker fish (which, though not really edible, was to be used by Jeff & Dave as bait on their fishing expedition the following week):



That evening, Dave came by to have dinner with us and we all hung out on the deck drinking coffee spiked with either whiskey or rum:



The next day, we left early, continuing on our trek. Not a lot to say. We drove a little over 800 miles making it clear to the outskirts of St.Louis. We then got up early again and drove south along the Mississippi. There was a lovely view of the river north of Cape Girardeau:



We crossed into Illinois and passed through Cairo, one of the more depressed towns I've seen before traversing the Ohio River just where it pours into the Mississippi. That night was spent in a beautiful campground at Land Between the Lakes (in western Kentucky):