Sunday we woke up to cleared skies and no more rain! Hooray..we could enjoy our day. Unfortunately some of the group had to leave early on Sunday instead of staying through Monday, so before those who were leaving hit the road we headed to Corky's BBQ. If you've never had Corky's, you should get in the car and head to the nearest one now.
After saying good-byes, we had to run a couple of errands before we decided to head back towards Gatlinburg to hopefully find a nice, easy hiking trail that would take us to a waterfall. I did a little googling while we were in the car and found a trail that said it was easy, only a mile to the waterfall, and this particular waterfall was situated in such a manner that you could walk behind it. That sounded really cool, so we headed that way.
What the little info page online failed to tell us was that the mile hike was up a mountain.
Now don't get me wrong - it was gorgeous. But as a group we were totally unprepared for this sort of trek. At some point, we had gone far enough that it seemed silly to turn back around, surely it couldn't be much further, etc...and we kept asking people that were walking back down how much longer. Everyone kept saying almost there, not much more, etc. It was encouraging but they were also a bunch of liars. At some point I had to just dig in and keep going, shut the world out, and tell myself "one foot in front of the other".
What turned out to be the equivalent of 36/38 flights of stairs later (thanks to Laurie's Fitbit), we reached the waterfall. It was beautiful and so very rewarding to know we made it all the way up there, but man, oh man was I tired.
Coming back down the mountain is the point at which a bit of an incident occurred and words were exchanged. While I don't really feel the need to get into all that here on my blog, especially since on my end all is well now, I will say it changed the remainder of the trip. But more on that for the next post.
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