Palmer Chapel

Next time you’re visiting the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and eager for a peek at the mountains’ human history, skip the traffic jams in popular Cades Cove, and head to the North Carolina side of the park.  The serene and lovely Cataloochee Valley, accessible via a winding gravel road just off I-40 west of Asheville and north of Maggie Valley, provides a haunting look at the park’s human past in what was once the Smokies’ largest settled community.

Front porch of the Caldwell House

The only thing roaming the woods, meadows, and trout steams of Cataloochee these days are elk…and a few wayward visitors looking to avoid the crowds of east Tennessee….

A long abandoned Bible in Palmer Chapel

For more detailed information on the history of the Cataloochee Valley, pre-order my new book Moon Smoky Mountains and Blue Ridge online.

The front door at Woody Place

Next time your angry boss or spouse tells you to “Go to Hell,” you really can…that is if you can book a flight to Grand Cayman in the western Caribbean.  It’s the only place I know of (at least literally speaking) where you can find Hell on Earth.  Don’t forget to send Mom a postcard….

Coming in from a kayak trip around John Hopkins Inlet (Courtesy Marylyn Williams)

If you’ve never traveled to Alaska previously,  and you’re overwhelmed by the vastness of this most beautiful of our 50 states, even though you’ve been dying to go there, there are some good ways to get your feet wet (no pun intended).  When Sarah and I took our latest girls’ getaway last summer, we booked a week-long small yacht tour of the Inside Passage through American Safari Cruises, which places you on a small luxury yacht with 12 to 36 other passengers and plies the small bays inaccessible to the increasingly large number of cruise ships that come sailing into Alaska’s southeast archipelago.  Not only will you enjoy comfortable (if small) accommodations aboard these small ships, you’ll also experience unparalleled access to the Alaska wilds (including unescorted kayaking excursions, explorations by skiff, and hiking adventures) while still being able to spend your evenings in something much finer than a tent.  I’m talking pretty well-done gourmet meals, an open bar, and daily opportunities for massage, yoga, and hot tub immersion.  Yes, it’s pricey.  But if your goal is to get an overview of southeast Alaska without sharing the experience with a thousand of your closest friends on a mega cruise ship and never setting your foot on land, it’s well worth the expense.

I’ll admit it.  I’ve never been a fan of flying, not even before 9/11.  But I do remember the days when flying wasn’t so…well…painful.  Those good old days when it was actually faster to fly from Washington, D.C. to Atlanta than to drive there.  Remember those days?

Now unless you’re flying across the ocean or across the country, flying just doesn’t make economic sense anymore.  Apart from the ridiculous prices you’ll pay for an airline ticket these days (and mind you, that’s a ticket that does not include the cost of checked baggage, though it does include a bag of exactly six tiny pretzels and a complimentary beverage–mostly ice in a little plastic cup), by the time you factor in the time driving to the airport, then finding a parking space, then riding some shuttle all over half the countryside to reach your terminal, then standing in a TSA line for an hour or more, finally getting on your flight only to find it delayed an hour (an hour you spend in a cramped seat on the tarmac), then flying to your destination, where you spend another hour or two trying to track down your luggage and an over-priced rental car….well, yep, you could have driven there faster.

The true headache of flying was made manifest to me over the holidays when I and my family were scheduled to fly out of D.C. to Minneapolis.  Yes, as it so happened, our flight was scheduled the day after a blizzard, which meant a seven-hour drive on snow-packed roads to the airport, only to find out 30 minutes after our arrival that our flight was cancelled.  Did I mention we were scheduled to fly on AirTran?  (That was the first mistake–there is a reason AirTran’s rates are lower.)

Well, initially I wasn’t worried, despite the mile-long line in front of AirTran’s customer service desk at Reagan International.  I had my cell phone, and AirTran’s customer service number.  I could get this mess straightened out and have us on another flight in no time!  How wrong I was.  AirTran, true to their lousy reputation, dropped all calls that day, forcing its thousands of unhappy, stranded customers to wait in long lines at the airport, many of them with exhausted two-year-olds just like ours.

THREE hours later we found ourselves at the customer service desk, after watching many folks ahead of us get turned away with no alternative flights, flights leaving on Christmas Day, and various other unhappy outcomes.  And here comes my first big piece of advice: If you find yourself in this situation, KNOW YOUR AIRLINE.  Know what cities they fly out of, and keep your options open.  If you go up to the desk after your flight is cancelled expecting you’ll get on another flight to your destination that very same day, especially in the wake of weather-related cancellations, you’re smoking more than cigarettes.  It took 45 minutes of negotiations with the lady at the AirTran desk, but we finally found a flight to Minneapolis that would put us there before Christmas.  But we had to be willing to drive three hours to another airport in Newport News to get on it, then be willing to spend the night in Atlanta before proceeding on to our final destination.

We took it.

And….40 hours after we intially started our journey to the airport, we were safely on the doorstep of my grandmother’s house in southwest Minnesota.  40 HOURS.  Did I mention it takes a little over 20 hours to DRIVE from our doorstep to my grandmother’s?   Exactly what did we gain by flying?  Certainly not any extra time with family.  Certainly no savings for our pocketbook given we had to pay full price for our two-year-old to fly even though she spent the whole flight in my husband’s lap.

Most businesses that offer this level of terrible service (and did I mention the cramped seats that make the airplane water closets seem spacious?) would eventually drive themselves under.  How do the airlines manage to stay afloat?

You got me.  But I’d be glad to hear any explanations you might come up with.

This is one increasingly less frequent flyer who is desperate enough to consider Amtrak an option in the future….

How's the hay on your side of the roof?

And chickens, too.  I wonder how many wrecks occur along Highway 441 south of Clayton, Georgia, with folks trying to figure out just what is going on here.  I know I had to make a U-turn, go back, and take another look.  Whoever came up with this idea for getting tourists to pile into their country store was no ninny. 

Sweet Highland County Maple Syrup at the Bolar Ruritan Club (Photo courtesy Jeff Greenough)

The latest issue of Virginia Living hit newsstands this week with my all too short article on my home stomping ground of Highland County.  If you’ve ever ventured over the mountains to find this sweet spot of earth, especially during “sugaring season,” you might be a bit disappointed by the derth of photography.  Never fear.  Photographer Jeff Greenough has posted his best shots from last year’s Maple Festival on his blog.  Check them out–then let me know if those maple donuts don’t look succulent enough to eat right off the screen….

Don’t miss the 2010 Highland Maple Festival March 13-14 and March 20-21.  Come hungry!

Glacier Bay National Park is easily one of the most beautiful places on earth, and nothing adds to that beauty like its sheer remoteness.  Find out how to get here (as in right where this lucky hiker is sitting) on my travel blog next week.

Hug me, Elmo.

If my daughter’s inability to let go of Elmo is any indication, Busch Gardens Williamsburg’s first Christmas Town was a great success.  If you haven’t been, and you have kids, check it out.  The little ones will go wild for the Sesame Street show, I promise.  And forget Santa, Elmo is way softer….

Sunset over Currituck Sound

I’ve never been a big fan of the Outer Banks of North Carolina as a whole, at least not the section most people visit, which includes Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills, and Nags Head.  Too busy, too crowded, and too much like one giant beach strip mall.

If you’re looking for a little more serenity on the shore, head north to Corolla.  Yes, there has been a boom in beach house building up here in recent years, but the area has a decidedly quieter feel as in no monster mini-golf parks, giant beach tourist traps, and endless streams of beachfront chain hotels.

The beaches are quieter, too.

You’ll likely have to rent a house if you want to stay in Corolla, as other lodging options are scarce with the exception of the Inn at Corolla Light.  But avoid Brindley Beach vacation rentals like the plague…unless you like staying in a house with dog hair stuck in the carpet and black grease caked on the dining room chairs.  Housekeeping is not their specialty.  Take advantage of Vacation Rentals by Owner or some other source where you can rent directly from the homeowners and not have to go through a rental agency.

And if you go in the shoulder or off season, like spring or early fall, you can get a substantial house rental for half the price of the summer season and still enjoy fine weather….and gorgeous sunsets year-round.

Juneau aside, I knew I was going to love southeast Alaska long before I ever got there.  I’d been dreaming of Alaska all my life, imagining a place where there was no human scale by which to measure things.

Alaska is funny that way.  You’ll wake up in the morning, peer out the window of your cabin, expecting to see a brown bear lumbering along the shore in plain and perfect view.  But no, he is only a brown speck you have to strain to see with your binoculars.  How can this be?  The shore looks like it’s right there, only a few feet away, and that boulder there could only be a few feet high.  You forget there is nothing out here in this wilderness by which to understand scale–no buildings, no automobiles, no people.  As it turns out, you are miles from that shore, that boulder is many stories high, and the bear, he’s big, too.  But your mind won’t grasp it.  It has not been taught how to measure nature in a world without man.

That is why it took me only moments to fall in love with my first views of the distant Fairweather Mountain range and the crumbling glaciers at their feet.  Everything is so massive.  And then there is the knowing, too, that there is no one out there, not one at all.

So how do you see it all?  Check back for the scoop on how to do it….and how to put yourself in the scenes above.