Tennessee

At Charles Bunion

Once more, I am overwhelmed by the amount of information and experiences I have to share with you all! And it’s only been 24 hours!

There are really only three items to cover, but each one is a doozy:

1) My motel last night

2) My hike today in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

3) The Comedy Barn

Even though I am very full of the Comedy Barn right now, which was the most recent experience of the three, I feel I must go back to last night in order to fully immerse you in my adventure.

First of all, I would just like to categorically state that the Bel Aire Motel in Gatlinburg, Tennessee is a disgusting shithole and no one should ever stay there unless they are a literal drug dealer or murderer, in which case one would feel right at home. It is a gross place with a creepy energy that is exactly the kind of location an SVU perp would happily take his victims.

The whole energy of it immediately struck the wrong chord. I had booked a room there for two nights, Wednesday and Thursday, but as soon as I walked in, after 9 weary hours on the road, I knew I did NOT want to stay. It was just one of those gross little roadside places where all the rooms open onto a creepy, badly lit, flooded parking lot. The “concierge” had an unpleasant aspect and clearly a pretty dim intellect. I asked to see one of the rooms, and while I was looking around, she called the room and asked, “Did you see the room?” I remind you that I had picked up the phone inside the room. Which was really gross. It wasn’t unclean, exactly, but it was the kind of place that made your skin crawl. You know what I mean? But it was already late, and dark, and I didn’t want to have to start looking for another place to stay, so I told her I’d take the room for the night.

MISTAKE! First of all, I just had the creepy crawlies BEING in that room. When I walked from the main office to my car, I passed by two obvious lowlifes lurking around the open door to their room, out of which drifted a clear stench of smokable narcotics. That was the kind of clientele this place clearly attracted. I felt extremely out of place. Maybe that’s snobby of me, but on the other hand, no. I am obviously better than those people, so no apologies. I did not belong there.

But this isn’t the worst part. The worst part came later, at night, when I was asleep in the enormous creepy king-size bed, and someone STARTED TRYING TO GET IN MY ROOM and asdjaksjdfaksdfh, I’m freaking out just THINKING about it. He put his key card in and started jiggling with the knob. I woke up immediately. I WAS SCARED SHITLESS. I could hear the guy talking to someone, and he obviously thought my room was his room - he got the room number wrong, but he really seemed to still be making a real effort to get into MY room, and OMG it was so freaking scary because this was a REALLY shitty motel and I felt no certainty that he wouldn’t be able to get through the door. Finally I screamed out, “CAN I HELP YOU?” Immediately he answered, “Oh, sorry,” and stopped, but the adrenaline flowing through my veins did not, and I lay awake in bed, my heart pounding, cursing to myself, for at least an hour. I got up, checked the door. It honestly looked like it was partly open. I locked it, put on the chain. But the thing was, I could hear sketchy people walking around outside my room, and I could also hear EVERYTHING in the rooms on either side of me because the walls were so thin. I could hear the guy to my right snoring. And I could hear the guy to my left, i.e., the would-be invader, talking to his friend for hours. It was a hellhole. I was so creeped out and scared I barely slept. I woke up early and fled.

So I repeat, the Bel Aire Motel in Gatlinburg is a terrifying dump where no respectable person should wander. TELL YOUR FRIENDS.

At least I learned a valuable lesson, which is don’t stay at a disgusting motel just because it’s cheap.

So then, today. My hike. There’s so much to say about it, and I’m so tired, which has been the trend every night of my trip so far. And I am going to be VERY sore tomorrow.

I had looked up different trails at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park earlier, and hit on two, one longer - 8.1 miles - and one shorter - 3.6 miles - as possibilities. I figured I would head to the general starting off point and decide then. It was cold out, and I really didn’t know how much I could or should do. The idea of setting off on an 8-mile hike through the Appalachian Mountains by myself in the cold seemed kind of stupid. But I did want to hike. That’s why I came here, after all. So I drove through the stunning forests leading to the trailhead. Wow, what a difference driving through it during the day and at night, when it was just creepy blackness.

View of the Smokies from Newfound Gap.

I started to get excited. But as the road went up, snow appeared, and then ice, on the trees and surrounding landscape. Clearly, it was going to be cold up there. And it was. As soon as I stepped out of the car, I realized I couldn’t do the longer hike. But then I found out the shorter hike was closed.

Several different trails led from the parking lot, so I decided to just strike out and go as far as I could. The path was ice from the moment you stepped onto it. But I didn’t care. I was grinning ear-to-ear. I was in the mountains, hiking. Another one of those life-is-happening moments.

The Appalachian Trail.

It was cold. And icy. And snowy. As in, the entire mountain was covered in snow, and the path was either sheer ice, slush, snow tramped down into uneven icy footprints, and occasionally softer snow. There were maybe 100 feet of trail that weren’t covered in some kind of wintry precipitate.

It was pretty beautiful, but immediately I began to have doubts. First of all, it was very cold. Second of all, I was alone. And third, the path was clearly not the safest. If I fell or something happened to me, no one would be able to find me. I began to wonder if I was asking to die. Growing up Jewish, and being raised by helicopter parents who openly tell you of all the hours of sleep they’re missing because they’re staying up worrying about you, you eventually develop a sort of personal radar, a nagging voice in the back of your head when you’re doing anything questionable in terms of your personal safety. Am I safeguarding my life properly? Am I taking really stupid risks for no reason? Am I being a complete idiot? Am I going to make some dumb decision that will result in some totally avoidable tragedy IF I HAD JUST LISTENED TO MY PARENTS?!?

So I was hearing those voices. Loudly.

Then God sent me my trail angels. Two girls had set off on the hike just before me, and we passed each other a couple of times before I stopped to chat, about an hour in (By the way, EVERYONE says “hi” to other hikers when they pass on the trail.) I asked where they were heading - Charles Bunion, same place as me - and if they were thinking about turning back.

“Nope,” they said confidently. “Are you?”

“No,” I lied. “I just wanted to know if you were.”

“Well,” said one of them, “You’re welcome to hike with us if you want.”

YES! He may have His back turned when it comes to seedy motels, but when it comes to not dying a lonely, icy death, He’s got me covered.

They were twin sisters from Knoxville named Rhonda and Robin, and they were expert hikers familiar with the area. When I say “expert”, I don’t mean they had all the gear, or knew the maps, or anything like that. I mean they wore jeans, carried one backpack between them, and I didn’t see either of them take more than five sips of water throughout the entire six-hour hike. They were hiking masters. To them, this was just a saunter in the woods, although they admitted they hadn’t expected the snow and ice. They’d hiked the same trail in winter before and there hadn’t been snow. Apparently, this was totally not normal and the weather is usually much nicer. Of course.

But with them, I felt infinitely safer and more confident. They so clearly didn’t think the conditions were cause for concern that I felt calmer too, and wondered if I’d overreacted. I thanked them for letting me join, and joked about them being the last people to see me alive. Luckily, they laughed.

My trail angels Rhonda and Robin.

So on we went. They were very nice girls - not very talkative, but willing to answer any questions I asked, and always solicitous of me when it came to getting past some massive obstacle. Rhonda was the friendlier of the two. She told me that they hiked, on average, once a month. Yet they maintained full appreciation for the natural beauty around us, often stopping to look at a great view or commenting on the prettiness of the scenery. For them, of course, the snow was much more novel, whereas I had never really dreamed of hiking an ice mountain.

The going was slow. Usually, the hike took the girls two hours there and two back, but picking a way through the snow slowed down the pace quite a bit. Robin was generally the leader. She found a technique for dealing with the ice paths: walking on the side of the actual trail, where the snow was softer. This often meant navigating around trees or jumping back and forth to one or the other side of the trail, and when the snow was deeper, as it was higher up, it meant risking plunging in to mid-calf. Robin wasn’t the first person to have this idea - footprints showed that others clearly had also walked around the trail, but I wondered if I would have thought of it on my own. I guess I’ll never know.

We passed through many different types of ice/snow. Sometimes it was hard and crunchy and you could walk on the surface without breaking the crust. Sometimes it was just a sheer river of ice. Sometimes the snow was softer, and sometimes slushier. My neck began to ache because I was constantly looking down at the ground to watch where I was walking. In fact, I didn’t really see much of the trail for that reason. There was no way to hike without paying close attention to every footfall, and that didn’t really leave a lot of room for gazing around in wonder.

We saw some cool stuff, though. Before leaving on my trip, I had read pretty much all of Bill Bryson’s travel books, including A Walk in the Woods, an account of his attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail. Of course, he went through the Smokies. It was, simply put, very cool to see the places he described in real life. For example, we saw one of the overnight shelters, which he explains are put up at approximate intervals of 18 miles or so, roughly the amount a thru-hiker (someone who is hiking the entire trail) would get through in a day. It was just as he had described: a simple wooden structure, open on one side, with a large plastic sheet over the opening and a sleeping platform for campers, with a water source nearby and a “toilet area”. Arriving at a shelter after a full day of hiking probably makes these shacks seem like heaven.

Appalachian Trail shelter.

Occasionally, the woods parted to reveal a pretty vista, and I began to understand why this mountain range is called the Smokies. For some reason, the entire landscape of this section of the Appalachian chain seems covered with a blue haze. The mountains themselves look blue. It was very beautiful, though the most stunning views weren’t visible until we reached our destination, an outcrop of rock called Charles Bunion, at which point my phone, of course, died at 44% battery so I did not get a single picture of it.

I stole this picture from the twins.

But I wasn’t that upset, despite the abundance of rich photographable fodder. After all, what’s a photo really? The only point of taking them these days is to post them to social media. The last time I printed photos was at least 5 years ago. And I almost never look back at photos that I’ve taken of beautiful natural scenery because, let’s face it, it’s not interesting. I’ve thought about this for years. You get to a beautiful place, and you barely even look at it with your eyes before you’re lifting up a camera to capture it so you can show it to other people and make it seem like you live a cool life because you’ve been there. But there’s almost no actual BEING involved. So when my phone died I was forced to only be, and look, and experience.

We climbed up on the Bunion. I don’t know why it’s called that, but I’m sure there’s some interesting historical explanation; look it up. We didn’t actually go up to the very top because of the ice and wind factors. There are no trees, and it was very windy and chilly up there. We sat on the rock. I pulled out my snacks and started eating Cheezits and they were so delicious. I don’t particularly love Cheezits, but when you’re sitting on top of a mountain looking at a breathtaking view of an open valley surrounded by blue peaks reaching into the distance, and also when you’ve been hiking through snow for three hours, boy do they taste good. And they were part of that experience.

I savored it. I felt alive. I was on top of a mountain - in America - that I had climbed - looking over purple mountains majesty - eating Cheezits. We were all silent. I drank in the moment. Eventually, I asked the girls to take a picture of me and text it to my phone.

It didn't come out that great.

We stayed for maybe 20 minutes or so before starting the journey back. While hiking you go through stages. Sometimes you get into a groove, and you feel energized, and stride on full of well-being and purpose. Other times, you just want to sit down. At first, going back, which was actually uphill, that was how I felt. We were literally just past the halfway mark and I was already yearning to be done. I stumbled along, lagging behind the girls, my legs only reluctantly obeying my commands to move forward. But after a while (okay, when the uphill portion was over), I frisked up a bit and finished the hike in pretty good stride.

Going back was both easier and harder. It didn’t take as long, and downhill is obviously less challenging. But the path had majorly iced up, and we had to creatively negotiate a number of tricky areas. For some reason, I found it easier to walk on the ice than the girls did, and for the most part they continued seeking higher ground. But actually their method was better. Coming down on hard ice, often frozen in weird angles from footprints, is much tougher on feet and knees than working through softer snow. We all slid and slipped at some point. I fell twice, and each of the girls fell at least once, though in a quieter manner than I (all of my flailings were accompanied by comic-book sound effects. “Yikes!” “Whoops!” “Yeeks!” “Gah!”).

We passed many more people going up in the afternoon, all serious hikers with big packs and lots of equipment. I thought it might have been because they were nearing the end of the day’s hike and planned to stop at the shelter. All of them wore chains on their boots for hiking on ice (known in the biz as “crampons”, hahaha) and seemed nonplussed by the conditions. And every single one of them said “hi” to us. In general the other hikers were very friendly, and one guy even helped us down a tricky ice patch (mostly by catching us as we fell).

The second half of the trip was much quicker than the first. By the time we reached the last bit of trail, the ice from the morning had melted, leaving wet, squishy mud, so I guess we had to be thankful it wasn’t like that throughout the entire 8 miles. When we finally reached the parking lot, we joined a bunch of other hikers attempting to clean their boots by kicking, scraping and stomping on snow. It kind of worked.

I parted ways with the twins in the parking lot after giving them my number so they could text me their pictures. I drove from there into Gatlinburg, found its Starbucks and searched for a place to stay. I was inclined to spend a little more on a nicer place. I was really just disgusted by the entire idea of a motor lodge. I wanted a place with a door that didn’t lead to a sketchy parking lot. Preferably a hotel. And I found one in Pigeon Forge. For only $5 more than that hole! And I bought a ticket for the Comedy Barn. And then drove to the hotel. WHAT BLISS! The moment I walked in I felt lighter. It had a lovely reception area, and a lovely receptionist. It was clean, and had multiple floors, and when I got to my room I literally jumped for joy. I mean that I actually ran leaping and prancing across the room multiple times because I needed to physically express my extreme happiness at being in a comfortable lodging.

So I guess I am kind of spoiled. But NO! Go stay at the Bel Aire Motel and then tell me I’m spoiled, I dare you. NO, DON’T! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STAY AWAY FROM THAT PLACE!

And I STILL have to talk about the Comedy Barn!

I should give some background. In season 3, episode 3 of my favorite TV show, 30 Rock (“Stone Mountain”), Jack and Liz go to Kenneth’s hometown in Georgia to scout for talent at the Chuckle Hut/Laugh Factory, a pig slaughterhouse/comedy club, obviously. And as I was driving through Pigeon Forge last night on the way to Gatlinburg, I saw a billboard advertising the Comedy Barn. THE COMEDY BARN! My interest was immediately piqued. And I continued seeing ads for it as I drove. It is apparently one of the town’s biggest attractions. So I kind of felt like I HAD to go. After all, I didn’t have anything to do tonight, it would certainly qualify as a very new experience completely outside of my usual range, and also, it was called the Comedy Barn. So I HAD to, even though at first I balked at the ridiculous price of $38 for a ticket.

How could you say no to this?

BUT OMG, WORTH EVERY PENNY. I drove over to the Comedy Barn, and JUST LOOK AT IT - tell me you could see that and not at least wonder what was inside. As I was getting out of my car, a random guy in the parking lot asked if I was going to see the show and when I said yes, he commended me on my choice, telling me it was great. I thanked him for the endorsement. As I walked in, I was filled with joyful anticipation, because I knew, I just KNEW, that this would be beyond all knowable boundaries of my world and I was SO excited. Like, genuinely excited, not ironically. I wasn’t there to judge or observe. I was there to LAUGH.

It's a barn. Of comedy.

I was seated in the first row, but unfortunately I wasn’t heckled at all. It seemed to me that most of the entertainers focused on/victimized only middle-aged male audience members. In fact, out of maybe 10 audience volunteers, only one woman was picked and I had a feeling that was very intentional. I was seated next to a lovely couple from Georgia, and of course, because that’s the way of it down here, the husband, who was right beside me, immediately said “hi” and we began to chat. His name was Ken, and he and his wife were in town celebrating their 28th wedding anniversary. It was also their first time seeing the show, and he sure enjoyed it. But so did everyone. Because it was freaking hilarious. I’m not joking. I was crying literal tears of laughter. TEARS!

Not every part of the show was funny. (It was a variety show, not stand-up.) I didn’t really care for the musical interludes, mostly because I had no idea what any of the singers were saying, and I could have done without the random tap-dancing girl. One of the first skits was funny, but odd. It involved a dozen extremely well-trained cats jumping on stools, walking beams, leaping through hoops, etc. At first I liked it, but by the end, when they had a cat climb a 20-foot pole and then jump down from it onto a pillow, I was feeling a bit uneasy about the idea of using animals in this circus-like fashion. I wasn’t quite sure about that one.

Inside the Comedy Barn.

But there were a few stand-out sketches that were just so funny. I can’t really explain why or what was funny about them. A lot of it was character-driven - i.e., these guys would come out playing a ridiculous character with all of these weird gimmicks, and just those mannerisms were funny. And a few of them clearly had comedic talent, working with the crowd and pulling out snappy comebacks which couldn’t have been rehearsed. At one point, a 2-year-old boy got away from his parents and ran towards the stage, with his father chasing after him, and the guy on stage went, “We’ve got a runner! FREEDOM!!!!!!” and everyone lost it.

However, I had a feeling some of the audience volunteers were vetted beforehand. I’m not sure exactly why, but some of the bits were just too good to be totally improvised. Weirdly, out of the first 5 volunteers, three were named Steve and two were named David. I’m not kidding. The later ones had other names, but in one pool of three, literally two of them were named Steve. No one else noticed, though. When I pointed it out to Ken, he was really surprised. And in the second half of the show, there was one kid volunteer who was just so clearly rehearsed. I found that less entertaining. But the last sketch totally saved it when the host brought up three audience members to act out a story and every single one of them was terrible/hilarious. The woman (the aforementioned only female volunteer of the night) could not remotely perform her part. She did everything wrong, and then she started laughing and couldn’t stop. And she just laughed for the remainder of the sketch. But it was really funny. Of course, the show ended with a massive American flag being lowered over the stage and the cast singing “God Bless America”, and everyone in the audience standing up. Because this is the south.

GOD BLESS US.

In short, it was brilliant. There was some mild political commentary that I didn’t care for - a throwaway joke about Obamacare that I didn’t love, and some waxing nostalgic for the cleaner, more wholesome days of yore, when you could watch any TV program with your kids in the room and there was prayer in schools. The show was billed as “clean” family comedy - that was really the message being pushed. Which I respect. After all, it’s great to be able to laugh with your kids and your parents too. But in my bleeding-heart liberal opinion, that doesn’t mean every kind of comedy needs to be family-friendly.

But overall, in case you couldn’t tell, I loved it. Unlike the Bel Aire Motel, I totally and wholeheartedly recommend the Comedy Barn the next time you are in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Also, at the end of the show, the guy who had spoken to me in the parking lot hopped down from the stage and said, “You’re welcome for the endorsement.”