Sha-Kon-O-Hey (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mountains of Blue Smoke at my Family Reunion in Tennessee)

So yes, I've been home for quite a while and yes it's been forever and a day since I've posted but you know what? Sometimes I'm lazy...

At any rate, I have to give credit where credit is due for the following photo essay - with few exceptions the pictures seen here were all taken by my cousins and siblings... they were then pirated for my personal gain so they could all reach Total Victory and infamy on a blog of more considerable importance and more substantial viewership then their own...

On to the photos! I'm going to try to go as chronologically as possible, but since it was so long ago I may have gotten the days mixed up...

So, there's really nothing like overnight red-eye plane trips, which I find myself taking more often then I'd like to - it's a nice way to not have to miss work and still arrive in time to do things the next day when traveling West-East...

Upon arriving in Tennessee and getting my rental car, two things hit me: Number one - this place was awesome, with roadside stops like this one:

And number two: this place was GREEN - and I mean like naturally green - no sod, no articifial turf, but GREEN - a stark contrast to the BROWN that is the Northern California desert this time of year...On our first night there we held a family talent show - between Uncle Reed re-writing Casey at the Bat, my nephew and second cousin combining to tell us about all the Pikachu (SP?) characters and my cousin and his wife demonstrating how to put on makeup with someone else's hands, there was this gem of my cousin Carson playing Star Wars on his recorder... in his own unique way...

The next several pictures don't have a definite time frame, but they're just of random family members in different poses... like this one of Uncle Reed... dead...

Or this one of my Mom (the blonde) pouring water over my Aunt Alyssa (the monkey?) in what has to be some kind of cartoon tribute to the two most famous people from the area: Dolly and the unwashed yokel...

My cousin Garrett without a care in the world... just walking...

My niece Cat with Quinn after our grand geocaching experiment left all the kids pretty tired... (take note parents...)

My cousin Lind-say-so's husband Brade doing his impression of a Russian acrobat... I didn't see this, but I can only see a military roll saving this from disaster...

This may be my most favorite picture that my sisters and I have ever taken together - they look awesome, of course, but nothing compared to how awesome I look! This is on top of Gattlinburg after riding a ski lift to the top of a mountain to oversee the booming metropolis of Ripley's museums and airsoft gun stores...

We went to a river where we could jump off rocks (rocks about 7 feet off the ground, but still rocks) and the water was the coldest I have ever felt in my life... colder than Emigrant's Gap even, which is saying something... it was so cold that my grandparents, Oma and Opa Whitlock, could only dip their toes on...

Cold enough that we had to sun ourselves on the warm rocks after periodically being in the water (sidenote: notice my Cousin Matt's swim trunks... this makes the second Matthew that has worn these shorts after forgetting to pack a pair of his own... considering I only know two Matts, this makes 100%... remarkable, no?)

And it was so cold that it made the young'uns cry... like my cousin Brooke... (actually she was crying because there was a bee in her hair, but I thought the cold thing went better with the present asthetic...)These are all of my cousins and my Oma and Opa at the unbirthday party - a chance to celebrate all the birthdays in the family, of which there were none during the week that we were there... we had a pinata and it was cool...

I can't believe this is the only picture I have from Dollywood - yes that's right, DOLLYWOOD! Maybe when Alyssa FINALLY posts her pictures on her blog I'll have more... Now, for those unfamiliar, this is a whole theme park devoted (by Dolly) to what the Cherokee called Sha-kon-o-hey, or the Spirit of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which Dolly loved and respected so much she decided to build a 50-acre theme park right in the middle of it...

On our last afternoon we went deep into the Blue Ridge mountains along the Appalachian Trail to do some hiking and more geocaching...

This is atop Clingman's Dome, an observation tower that puts you at the highest point east of the Mississippi or something like that... it's so high that what you see here isn't fog... it's a cloud... literally we were standing in the middle of a cloud...

We then went on a little more strenuous hike up to the caves where the Confederate soldiers used to mine salt to help the war effort...

This is the top of the cave/mine... can you see all the salt?

Uncle Jamus isn't used to the humidity... which was on point that day...

And one final shot of the beauty of the mountains...

So after the Whitlocks and all the hangers-on departed ways, I drove down some country roads and through the Smokies to Atlanta to spend some time with my Dad and his family... where when I was pitching to his adopted son Kyle, he sent a baseball back at my ankle... and let me tell you something, if you've ever seen where a pitcher gets a comebacker to the ankle and topples over like he was sideswiped by JCVD, let me tell you... that happens...

So thus concluded my trip - I got back to Sacto exhausted but it was awesome... and the Spirit of The Blue Ridge Mountains will always remain with me... because as Dolly says, "Once you've been here, you carry Sho-kon-o-hey with you wherever you go, and it becomes your responsibility to share it with others..."

So in that light: