Smoky Mountains

First place I headed after leaving C'ville was Charlotte ... After reaching there, the first thing I did was head over to my ex-Boss's place in the suburbs ... I was meeting her after almost 3 years ... She's a German-American married to a Pakistani, and has two very sweet daughters ... After a dinner at her place, I headed over to my BITSian friend, VNR's place, where SR and GS were staying ... The next day four of us made plans to visit the Smoky mountains ... At the very last moment we decided to make it a camping trip, since it was a good 4 hour drive away ...


Here's an SR snap taken from his Rebel ... After a point, all these national parks start looking the same (at least to me!) ... But till now I had only visited parks in the East Coast ... Let's see how things change later on ...

There's the camping team ... SR, GS and VNR ... All BITSians ... Munching on apples ... One peice of advice I got from the girls on apples ...

"An apple a day keeps the doctor away ... unless the doctor is cute ... then keep the apple away" ...

Pitching up the tent after getting our campsite in the north end, Tennessee side of the Smokies ... A secluded park called Cosby ...

Brand new tent being inaugrated here ...

Getting the stove up and cooking Fried Maggie, a staple BITSian dinner ...

Here's another shot of the tent ...

Playing cards ... They taught me a new game called Ass ... I think they left out explaining some of the subtelities to me, since I ended up being the Ass 90% of the time ...

We also managed to get a campfire going and I taught everyone how to make S'mores, a very healthy campfire snack :) ... Be sure to look it up ...

Once the fire died down, we shifted inside the tent and continued our game of Ass, despite all my protests ...

We finally stopped Ass after a while and started chatting ... Or as we say in BITSian lingo - putting laccha ... mostly BITSian gossip ... GS, VNR and me were from the same batch, so we were the most active in the discussions ... SR was one batch senior to us, so he relaxed in the background and chipped in with some creative comments (or moderate, as he liked to call it) ... i was actually quite surprised how much these girls remembered about BITS ... After more than 5 years! ...

We slept only at 4 am ... and that too after a neighbouring camper asked us to shut the hell up since it was 5 hours after quite hours in the camp ... So that's how I came to know that there is a thing such as "quite hours" in these campsites ...

Next day ... No trip to the Smokies is complete without a visit by a bear ... We ran into this little creature early in the morning the next day ... Lucky thing the mom or dad wasn't around ...

After vacating the campsite, we took a drive through the park for some more photogenic shots ...

The Appalachian trail ... It's supposed to be the longest forest walking trail in the world, stretching well over 2000 miles ... We covered exactly 5 meters in an attempt to pose for this snap ...

A view of the dyinig forest ... Some European virus was responsible for this happening ... This was taken on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina ... Supposed to be the highest point on the smokies ...

Some random solo shot along a creek ... I'm glad the photo was taken before I fell in, wet my clothes and SR's precious camera cover that I was carrying ... I'm glad he didn't notice ... he'll find out when he reads this blog, but by then I'll be 1000 miles away ...

That was Smokies, the most visited National Park in the US ... NC is now checked ... Let's move on to the next state ...