A Little Drive

It was a beautiful sunny day here at the farm and so we decided to take a short afternoon drive.  We began our journey and we were headed to Meadow Creek Tower, an old fire tower used by the U.S. Forestry service built in 1926, but found out the trail to it was too long for us to reach and get back before dark so we decided to take a little drive around the area instead.  For Tim and I we were in unfamiliar territory but since George was driving we had no worries.  We started towards Del Rio, TN when just outside the town we took a mountain road just to explore.  It started out as a paved two lane highway, turned into a paved road that eventually went to gravel mix to gravel to dirt.  Since we had begun to climb the mountain and the views were great we just continued to drive.  The higher we went the narrower the road got until we were eventually on an old loggers road turned into a way, the hard way, to get to the top of the mountain.  We were on Round Mountain that borders Tennessee and North Carolina.  At times the road was a little tough but George and Lisa's Honda CRV was doing great.  We were not sure where we were going to end up but we didn't care because we were all enjoying the ride.  Okay George was driving so maybe he wasn't as relaxed as were we.  The road we were on was narrow and had lots of curves but the views were spectacular.  We climbed to 3100 ft to reach Round Mountain campground in the Cherokee National Forest then continued to climb up to Max Patch, a bald mountain that borders the North Carolina-Tennessee border at 4600 ft.  Check back tomorrow for more about Max Patch. We then started to head down the mountain to Hot Springs, NC.  

So the drive we took essentially started in Tennessee but we ended up in North Carolina and took the LONG way to do it.  Did we mind?  Not a bit, we did something different locally, we were with good company, Tim, George, Lisa and I and we ended up on an unexpected adventure that also gave us more places to visit and retreat to during the hot summer days.  Out next exploring day is already in the planning stage. Check back tomorrow for more of our adventure.