The Smoky Mountains and home sweet home

Up bright and early for the next day of our adventure, we pootled along the Cosby Highway to the rental office for our original cabin. Greeted with the remark ‘so you girls had a bit of an adventure last night’ we realised just how small the community was! The owners of Cosby Creek Cabins did us proud by not only waiving the charge for the previous night’s rental but also offering us an alternative, more Mazda 6-friendly cabin. It was with some trepidation that we set off for another back road, uphill all the way (and yes that means more sheer drops either side), but to our amazement, we arrived at one of the most stunning buildings I’ve ever seen, let alone stayed in. They’d done us proud, I think they gave us one of their best units and we were on a mission for the rest of the day to enjoy it. After 10 minutes, we decided that 2 nights just wasn’t enough and got on the phone to change our plans. We decided to knock a night off our visit to Nashville and add one to our stay in Cosby.

Everything about the house (Ridge Retreat) was amazing, the building, the view, the location, the sun flooding onto the porch, the hot tub, the enormous fridge, the outdoor grill, the games room, the lawn, the quilts and wall-hangings, the mezzanine en-suite bedroom, the bathroom on every floor and the cubby-type bedrooms. We were even pleased to see a washing machine! We decided to scrap our plans for the day, hit the supermarket and stock up on magazines, nibbles, barbecue food and beers – rock on! The news of the floods at home and the almost incessant rain we’d had earlier in the year made us want to make the most of our good fortune and enjoy the weather.

Of course you can’t send two girls just to the supermarket when there are other shops in the vicinity. A few blocks away from the supermarket is the Gatlinburg arts and crafts community. We felt like we were getting the full down home experience by dropping in at a couple of outlets, selling reclaimed and recycled just about everything, shops making pottery, wall hangings, goats milk soap, lye soap (a local specialty) and we even met one of the area’s hardest workers, Willy the kid, kitted out in a trendy studded collar and happy as anything to see visitors. A few dollars lighter, we headed back to the cabin and set about the serious business of hot-tubbing, drinking, relaxing and barbecuing.

So the sunshine was the highlight of the day, but oh my goodness, when darkness falls in the Smoky Mountains, it falls hard! City girl that I am, I have never been so glad to sleep with a light (and a Bridezillas marathon on TV) on in my life! It’s not just the absolute pitch darkness, but the creepy bug noises that go with it – I’m with Jo on this, who goes camping in that? I had already been bitten by something awful as well as being bitten by at least a dozen slightly less awful things, and I have to recommend the Savlon spray we had with us, over any of the repellent we used. It’s going to happen, you’re better to try and make yourself feel better afterwards instead of trying to prevent the inevitable. Settled down on the couch with the night outside and the doors very firmly locked, the house even started making creepy noises – at least I hope it was the house, we started to wonder if we had done the right thing by extending our stay. Believe it or not, we managed to find Most Haunted on one of the more obscure cable channels and that didn’t improve matters either. Once we’d gotten over ourselves, we had a relatively early night looking forward to the next day of our holiday.