A few days in the Smoky Mountains....

"I’m having far too good a time to bother with writing a column.

Last night we sat around a campfire on the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains, eating smores and telling ghost stories about ex-significant others.

And drinking cabernet sauvignon out of Styrofoam cups. While our beers cooled in my trout net drifting in the nearby stream. I don’t think there are any trout in there. I hope there’s no giardia, either. There’s some rum around here, somewhere.

You drink a room-temperature red wine with meat and a chilled white with fish or fowl.
What do you drink with Chex Mix (with M&Ms mixed in – yum)?

I must confess we did have a tent pole break last afternoon and I wound up with a shard of fiberglass through my finger. But I got it out. I’ve never hammered in tent stakes with an unopened beer bottle before. Better wait a while before I unlock that one….

I’m here with some friends from where I went to high school in Wake Forest, north of Raleigh. They were going to take a trip to New Orleans, but Katrina beat them to it. So here we are.

I think this afternoon we’re going over to Cherokee. Some of our folks wanna try their luck at gambling."