Over the weekend, Heather drug...I mean had me willingly escort her to another TN wedding. It was a good time though unseasonably hot and strangely quick by some standards. We stayed at the Bunkhouse Inn on the River, and the next morning as I was reading my bible (I'm teaching Ruth for a class...not that I don't normally read the bible in the morning...) and sipping my coffee by the river, a burly man in a checkered shirt stepped out on to the adjoining porch. His name was Tim, and he asked if I fished. After disappointing him, we talked about the local sights, and he directed me to Clingmans Dome, even showing me on a map on his laptop while singing the praises of wireless Internet and cursing his forgotten wireless mouse.
So we (Heather and I, not Tim and I) went to the top of Clingmans Dome, third highest point east of the Mississippi, and since I've never been west of the Mississippi, I was very impressed. Also while we were there, we walked a short bit on the Appalachian Trail and the Mountain-to-the-Sea trail, where we saw a sign informing us that the next shelter had been closed due to "aggressive bear activity." Naturally, we turned around and ran the other way.
Going back through Cherokee, I convinced Heather to stop at Harrah's casino by offering to bankroll the excursion. I'd never been to a casino. Aside from the lung incinerating smoke and the infernally distracting lights and noise and 80s muzak and the soul-dead people mindlessly pushing buttons over and over with those cards stuck in the machine with a cord clipped to their body as if they were IVed to the machine and clicking the morphine button again and again, hoping for the sweet release of death... Aside from that, I had a great time...because I won. That's right; I took those suckers. For $4.25. Yeah, I'm a natural born gambler. Heather, however, wasn't born lucky and lost $4. But that still leaves me 25 cents up. I'm thinking of quiting my day job.
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