AT Prep and Plan

As if this summer isn’t going to be packed enough with the trek to Alaska, Sam and I are trying to pack in a week on the AT as soon as school gets out so I can get my hike on for the summer. As neither one of us has more than a handful of miscellaneous AT miles under our belts, we’re going to start at the beginning and walk north. We’re going to be leaving a little after the traditional northbound start time, but, then again, we’re not going nearly as far.

The plan so far:

Time Frame: May 22-31, depending on Maryville City Snow Days

Trip Length: 5 nights, 6 days; approximately 118 miles

Day One: Start at Springer Mountain whenever someone wants to drop us off; hike the 3 mile approach trail to Springer Mountain (pre-AT), then 15 miles on the AT to Gooch Mtn Shelter (total 18 miles)
Day Two: Gooch Mtn Shelter to Baggs Creek Gap Campsite (20 miles)
Day Three: Bagges Creek Gap to Tray Gap Shelter (22 miles)
Day Four: Tray Gap Shelter to Muskrat Creek Shelter (24 miles) -- this crosses from Georgia to North Carolina around mile 20
Day Five: Muskrat Creek Shelter to Rock Gap Shelter (24 miles)
Day Six: Rock Gap Shelter to Wayah Gap (9 miles); Pick up on the road around 1/2 pm

Even if we don’t make the whole haul, the plan is to at least tick off all of Georgia.

Anyone else interested in joining us for some or all of the trip?

Porter’s Creek Trail, Hiking Cabin, and Barn

Bailey’s Social Studies Fair Project

Royal Blue

Fall Break—Panama City Beach and St. Andrews Bay State Park

Great time on the Gulf of Mexico. We went here instead of some of our old standbys of Myrtle Beach, Charleston, etc., because we wanted to get some good snorkeling in. Unfortunately, the warning flags were out and the beaches were closed most of the time. The perks, though, were that we found St. Andrews Bay State Part—a true gem. Right off the edge of town, it was great. It was like a mini-Cades Cove with alligators and deer. We got to drive around, hike, walk on the beach, and just wander around. We saw our first alligator in the wild and a big ol’ jelly fish beached on the sand.

Later, we took the ferry from St. Andrews to Shell Island for the day. Beautiful. We rented a kayak, paddled around the bay, played in the water, fiddled with the snorkels (rough water so not much luck). 

Near the end of the week the water calmed enough for all of us but Myers to snorkel. Bailey’s mad snorkeling skills kicked back in. I was afraid that since she’d only ever done it in Little River that the ocean would freak her out, but she did awesome!

I thinking maybe somewhere in el Caribe next time? :)

Indian Boundary and Hooper’s Bald

It’s always a good birthday when you get to head to the mountains. Jean and Dexter took the camper for a weekend at Indian Boundary so we headed up after school Friday and spent the evening. We had so much fun we went back to spend the night Saturday.

Highlights of the trip were--

letting Bailey chauffeur me around the lake in the canoe… she paddled from the campsite to the beach and back, all by her lonesome, steering and all. After five years of canoeing, it finally clicked!

heading to Hooper’s Bald and taking the back way to do some huckleberry pickin’. [as of Dec. 29 I’ll be finishing off the last of the batch the next time I make pancakes. yum!]

canoeing with Myers when he’s settled down enough not to act like a nut—once again, it finally clicked.

getting to spend some good times outside!

Kayaking with Bailey and Jessica

Chilhowee Lake goodness.

Little River

FINALLY! After working just about every day this summer, now that I'm three weeks into school we finally got a chance to break out the kayaks. Bailey and I took the yaks to the car wash yesterday and gave 'em the good once over and de-sluggification for mine and gave the Rover its first proper exterior cleanin'. We surprised Bailey today with a new boat of her very own, so of course we had to go test it out. Bailey, her uncle David, and I threw the boats in the trailer and made for Little River. We paddled down just below Coulter's Bridge (about 5 minutes... past the bridge jumpers but not so far we couldn't paddle back up river) and tethered the boats to a patch of cane and hopped out to practice Bailey's snorkeling skills. Although she's been wanting to get into snorkeling since forever, I'd been really worried she'd freak out, hate it, and never give it a chance again. So, I put a life jacket on her, her mask, snorkel, and flippers. She laid down in the water, I held the jacket for about 30 seconds, and off she went, never looking back. She's a natural! Great time, no pictures, back to school tomorrow--

Splash Country

We are burned to a crisp. What else is there to say?
Aside from: Splash Country opens an hour early for season passholders on Saturday morning. IT IS AWESOME. We got to go in, set up, no crowd, no rush, staked claim to great seats, and got in the wave pool with the massive crowd of, o, five people. Good stuff. Next time I'll remember to bring the sun screen in from the car. (Ironically, neither Bailey nor Myers got burned, although Bailey is on a medicine that calls for limited sun exposure. Go figure. If Jodie were a super hero, though, her name would be Lobster Girl.)

Fourth of July

Fourth of July... woo! Since Alcoa didn't do the duck pond this year, everyone on our side of the county stocked up on fireworks. Usually all the houses down our stretch of the Pike are shooting off fireworks, but there was double previous years this time. David came down and shot off his leftovers, including some of the big artillery shells, and it was great. We set up hammocks and chairs in the yard and took turns watching fireworks at our house and several of the neighbors.

Little River Stream Ecology

Narrative coming soon... Unfortunately, there are no pics of the 3 copperheads basking on a pile of rocks in the middle of the river!

Father's Day at Metcalf Bottoms

We continued (restarted) one of my favorite family traditions... Father's Day at Metcalf Bottoms. Huge storms the night before, so it was empty at the picnic area. The only problem was that it put the water up way to high and brisk for the kids to play in. Still, a bad day in the mountains is better than most good days anywhere else.

Indian Boundary

Kick-off weekend for summer break! We headed to Indian Boundary for a late weekend to properly break in the camper (finally!). All the electrical worked great (supppppppper AC) and we had one of the prime campsites... that's what reserving in Feb. will do for you. We camped right on the lake. We could sit in the campsite and watch Bailey and Myers go down to the edge of the lake and fish. One of my favorite things about camping at IB is that if you want to take the canoe out, all you have to do is stand up, walk to the water, pull it in, and go. If we're going to paddle on Little River from home, there's at least an hour (usually two) of prep time getting the car, kayaks, kids, and car shuttles ready. The most exciting part of the weekend was getting to be there for 3 life star landings. Monday morning a girl in the campground had a seizure and had to be lifted out, then in the afternoon there were two wrecks on the Cherohala skyway that required air support.
We also learned a very valuable lesson--before we take Myers camping again, we are going to have to go to the Dollar store and get about 15 bucks worth of knick-knacky activities... water colors, play dough, etc. We were well prepped with big activities, but nothing for the down time. I figured canoeing, biking, hiking, fishing, swimming, etc. would keep everyone happy, but the instant we stopped one activity he was ready for something else. Ah, I envy his stamina.

Myers's Best Friend

Ah, the joys of yard ecology. Here are some pics of Myers and his best friend. It'll work best in dialog:
"This is roly poly. Him is my best friend. I lub him so much!"

One of the few animals/invertibrates that Myers has seen and not wanted to eat... like Sam the Lobster at Red Lobster and the Crawdads we caught last time at the river.

 

 

 

 

The Big Read

Next week on May 11 my Language Arts class will be sponsoring a pilot attempt at creating a mini-Big Read (where everyone in the area reads one book in the same time frame to spur discussion of issues raised, etc.) in our school.
For this year the idea of doing a novel was a little taunting for a first go, so we are doing The Lorax. Every class in the school will read the Lorax during homeroom and then we will encourage all class periods to have discussions or complete activities related to topics in the Lorax and their subject area.
If anyone has neat ideas or suggestions that I can pass on to math, science, or social studies teachers in particular, let me know!
Thanks--

Elk flu?

Nothing says "It's time for an impromptu trip to Cades Cove" like a healthy case of the flu.
To celebrate Bailey's double whammy of strep throat and flu, we drove up to the cove for the afternoon. When you think about it, there are few better places to go to get away from people than the Loop road on a rainy Saturday. Plus, we had to buy our obligatory "Garbage Kills Bears" and "Save the Hemlocks" bumper stickers for the new car. Woo doggie!
Even though it was the middle of the afternoon we were happy to see 14ish deer and rumors of a bear just around the bend. We didn't follow the camera-toting Alabamians to find out, though.
Pictures will be coming soon--

The Lorax may speak for the trees, but I sleep in the trees...

Thanks to the tons of much needed but very annoying rain, we FINALLY got to spend some time outside tonight. The ground was still pretty soaked, so we took the high road and took to the trees. The highlight was Myers pushing Bailey and I in the hammock singing a rousing rendition of "Rock a bye Daddy and Bailey in the bed."

BUBBLES!

So, Jodie bought a new toy for Myers today... a bubble blower. So, at 10pm tonight, Myers decided he'd be in melt down mode if he didn't have bubbles NOW. So we opened it up, added bubbles, and gleeful anarchy ensued. I have a feeling he'll be awake till we're out of bubbles!
By the way... the pictures don't capture this, but... it's close enough to bed time that Myers isn't wearing pants!

The Treehouse

The past two days have been designated Lombardo treehouse work days. In preparation for the kiddos birthday party, we've been, for the lack of a better catchphrase, pimpin' out the clubhouse as a mutual birthday present for Bailey and Myers. We've supplied the funding and Jodie's dad has supplied the labor. We've been adding monkey bars, climbing wall, and swingset, topping off the sand, taking care of some demolition (removing the walls and adding railing), and now we're getting ready to add a new metal roof (so I can go sit out in the clubhouse while it's raining.
We spent all day Saturday and Sunday working on the yard and getting the treehouse ready. Almost done!
By the way, Bailey took most of the pictures in the slide show... that accounts for some funky angles and awesome perspectives :)

Cades Cove

We took the beautiful weather on Tuesday as our opportunity to try to get the ball rolling on this year's batch of Get Out More activities. After rushing home from a hectic day of school, we celebrated Bailey's spring break by heading to Cades Cove to picnic at the picnic area. In spite of the beautiful weather, the Cove wasn't very crowded. Hitting the loop around 6 was perfect, as deer are crepuscular animals (most active around dawn and dusk). The grand total of critters seen ended up at 126 deer and a few handfuls of turkeys.

Workin' in the Garden

Whigg Meadow

This weekend we camped out at Indian Boundary in the overflow area. After spending a cold night (toasty in the sleeping bag) we headed up the Cherohala Skyway to Whigg Meadow. We hiked to the meadow from Mud Gap (a part of the Benton McKaye trail) down the road a bit to the site of a 1945ish military plane crash. We were able to see only a few parts since the plane had been bull dozed since it went down during WWII.

Chilhowee Lake Sunday

One of our new favorite family activities is to load up the car and head to Chilhowee Lake on Sunday mornings. Why? To fish? To canoe?
No, so the kids can throw rocks in the lake. Hours of satisfaction!

White Oak Sinks

We took the troop to White Oak Sinks for a day hike. You can never go wrong with White Oak Sinks.