Date:         Tue, 03 Jun 97 20:48:35 CDT
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         Joel Walker <JWALKER@ua1vm.ua.edu>
Subject:      BOTBR PQRZ ALPHABET trip report :)

... or How Unca Joel Wandered Up Nawth And Found Rain Forest On The Top
       Of A Mountain. :)

it was Thursday. late. very late. Dave the Schwarze hadn't arrived. he
was supposed to be here about midnight. when 0200 arrived, and he
didn't, i went to bed. about 0800 or so, he shows up. ha! :)

so off we go to Baggett's Truck Stop and All-Night Lot Lizard Lounge. :)
after feeding our faces, we jump on the Big Road and haul asses up Nawth
toward the Mason-Dixon line.

the trip up was mostly uneventful, except for this idiot in some sort
of Yuppie-mobile who didn't know left from right as we tried to cross
a median at the same time, in opposite directions! sheesh! we made good
time up to Chattanooga and Knoxville, affected only by the after-lunch
rush hour and the inevitable construction zone slow-downs in both
cities. finally got away from Knoxville, and onto I-40 eastward toward
Asheville. talked for a long time with a trucker about his job and the
Joys of Driving Among Idiots. :) lots of really neat scenery and tunnels
(wherein we honked our horns, just to hear them echo off the tunnel
walls). :)

one last stop before the Blue Ridge Parkway, tank up with gas, get some
film (which i had totally forgotten) at outrageous Hot-Spot prices, and
off we go. a helluva lot quicker than i had been led to believe, we were
at and on the Parkway. now came the tedious crawl into the clouds ...
up and up and yet more up we went ... into Elevation signs measuring
THOUSANDS of feet!! :) and more tunnels! short one, long ones, straight
ones, curved ones ... but these on the parkway were DARK! with only
reflective strips on the sides. the ones on I-40 had been brightly
lighted, but not these on the parkway. a very strange feeling, going
through them.

higher, and higher, and higher we climbed. until somebody noticed that
there was fog around us. hell, weren't no fog ... it's a cloud!! yup.
and you couldn't see more than about 50 feet in front of you. we kept
looking for the mile markers everybody had told us about. finally
found the right one, and turned in. a little guard shack and a gate,
and NObody there. ok, fine. now we're lost in the cloud/fog on the side
of some mountain in North Carolina ... now what? well, we follow the
little asphalt roads around and around and around and around we go ....
buses here and there, and then we get told by some shadowy figures in
the mist that we can't camp here (where Richard told us he'd be) cause
we weren't tent campers. ok, so now we have to find our way back UP the
hill to the other camping loop. great. whatever.

anyway, we finally find a place, put the buses in, and rig the tarp
between the buses.

at this point, i'm not too clear what happened when on which day. but
we wound up meeting lots of folks, some of them rather strange, others
semi-normal. :) lots and lots of buses. some in need of TLC, others in
need of serious surgery. one thing that was really runny (later, anyway)
was that Ken Winter had his brown/tan camper there, but so did Sonny
Flamer ... and they were identical buses. so we walked around on the C
loop of the campground, see Ken's bus, then go back up to the B loop,
see Sonny's bus, and figure it's the same one, only the guy can't make
up his mind where he wants to park! on Sunday, it gets figured out, as
they both showed up at the photo shoot, and park nose-to-nose. :) kinda
neat, seeing twins like that.

Weston Croft and his immediate-successor-to-the-family-bus came over
and hung around on Saturday night. actually they were stranded, when it
started raining ... like a cow pissing on a flat rock. i'm talking
BUCKETS here folks. LOTS of rain. Richard Palmer, his friend, Lizard
the ex-Marine, CeeCee, and Sean Bartnik were also straned, so a game of
Hearts was quickly started. Lizard wound up beating all of us soundly
... but then, he's a card-counter. i could smell it. watch out for him!
:)

we ran into Jonah Goldwag and his latest (but not for long) 90 white
syncro camper. Jonah can't seem to make up his mind WHICH syncro camper
he likes best! :) Louise Christensen was there, from atlanta, with her
neato orange fish bag in the window. actually really LOOKS like a fish
... really well done. neato flag or totem or something she had on a
pole, to mark her spot. :)  Mike Schoenlich (?) had a burgundy Syncro
camper with lots of neat mods and personalized stuff on it. he'd been
to alaska/yukon in it. Charlie Webb and Steve Best showed up, trying to
snag a few unsuspecting customers with their sidewalk yardsales. ;)
George and JoAnn from atlanta showed up in their beautiful magnificent
Dove Blue Metallic camper ... but wouldn't swap with me, so i could have
a matched set of D.Blue buses. :( well, that's ok. i know where they
live. i'll wait till some dark night .... :) Sean Bartnik had his bus
parked a few spots down from us ... he's trying to match me with his
fog lights and driving lights. ha! but then, he did bring his with him
and i had to leave poor ol' Gus the Bus behind: he has a bad oil leak.
and i didn't have time to swap the space shuttle landing lights over
to the camper. boy, i tell you: i ain't going back up to NC without
some GOOD foglights!!! Milt (Meltdown??) from florida parked his 74
camper right across from us. he was awful quiet for a bus person ...
musta been a long trip. Sonny Flamer and Bob Busick were just down the
road, and lots of other buses that i didn't see. Ken Hooper, wife, and
kids were down the other way from us.

what was really strange was that, in the fog/cloud, you can't really
hear very well. sounds don't make it through the water-vapor/mist and
what you hear isn't always what or where you think it is. so here you
are: blind past about 50 feet. dense vegetation all around you. the
night is growing darker and cooler. and off in the distance is the
unmistakeable sound of an air-cooled engine, roaring around, looking
for its nest. :)  oh, and now and then, you'd swear you could hear
indian drums or something. wierd.

impressions:
restaurant: good, a bit overpriced, but then what tourist trap isn't??
food was worth it, especially since it was close by. :) gift shop is
more of a rip off, but then it's a long way back down the mountain to
Wal-Mart!
campground: good. $10/night for the B-loop, no showers (i didn't find
them, anyway) but toilets and running water. pretty hilly, so if you
don't like climbing/walking inclines, it's not for you. i'd recommend
it.
view: well ... when the fog/cloud leaves, it's great. otherwise, it's
pretty much like being in a rainforest: LOTS of vegetation all around
you and LOTS of moisture all about. damp is what you feel most of the
time. a fire is a VERY wonderful thing in these situations. :)
people: aw, you're all NUTS anyway. :) what other bunch of idiots would
drive that far to camp in a cloud with a bunch of strangers??? and it
turned out there were people there from Tookalooka, my own town, that
i'd never met or seen. go figure. :)  everybody was really nice ...
even the dogs were nice. didn't see anybody with a cat.

the get-together/bonfire was Saturday night. Dave missed out on his
doorprize, but i won some little Galoob microbuses. well, i already
had the bus from the set, so i gave it away to some young lady who
had a splittie bus. she seemed happy to get them. :)

the photo-op was Sunday, about 10:00 am. drag yourself up, get dressed,
take down the tarp, and cram all the "stuff" inside the bus into nooks
and crannies where it can't hit you in the back of the head if you stop
suddenly. :) drive up the mountain and park at the Scenic Overlook.
holy cow! lookit all them buses! there musta been fifty or more buses
up there ... LOTS more than you would have guessed from walking around
the campground, or looking around at the people who showed up at the
saturday night thing. LOTS more. really neat.

they got all lined up, and people were walking around, talking, and
having a good time, and Then It Happened: Officer Opie, of the Park
Rangers and Part-Time Nazis, showed up. i didn't catch exactly what
was going on, but apparently we had all offended his sense of good taste
and propritity by having "too many" buses on this overlook ... a large
parking lot, designed for far more vehicles than we had assembled there.
but in this, the not-quite-tourist season, apparently we had fallen
afoul of some secret technical regulation. and, being outnumbered as
he was, Office Opie called for backup. yup. a 2nd Park Ranger arrived.
an older gent, he was more calm and cool. Opie kept rifling through his
lawbooks and clipboard, trying to find some legal basis for continued
harassment ... the older fellow seemed to just stand around looking at
all the buses.

anyway, it began to become worrisome, i think, and people started
leaving. that sort of removed the cause of any police action and things
just seemed to go away.

we wound back up at the restaurant, grabbed George and JoAnn's window
seat, ate lunch and wandered back out into the parking lot. whereupon
we found lots of other busfolks, still hanging around, trying to figure
out what they were gonna do. Dave, Ken Hooper, and i were heading west,
back to Gatlinburg and Knoxville, via the Road Along The Ridge. the
rest were thinking about going to the east coast and do some wind-
surfing (crazy Louise was the apparent ring-leader of this group!). :)

finally all the goodbye's were said, after several versions of i-can-
tell-a-bigger-war-story-than-you, and off we went. the Parkway is very
neat, but the hills were a little bit too steep for 3rd gear ... it was
getting down too low in rpm, but when i shifted down into 2nd, it was
roaring up around 4000 rpm. so it was a big uncomfortable at times,
carwise, but lovely road and view. it did, however, go on and on and on
and on ... seemed like forever! more tunnels, sharp switchback 20mph
turns, swapping sides of the mountain ridge, down into the valley and
back up to the ridge, flowing rivers/streams alongside the road ...
it reminded me several times of places in Colorado, except with LOTS
more vegetation. :)

at one point, Ken's bus was making a strange noise, so we stopped and
poked and prodded at it. it blew a little smoke, and was very hot, but
after about 30 minutes rest, and some gentle checking and laying-on of
hands by Ken and Dave (i've forgotten all i ever knew about air-cools.
and besides, there's only room for two in those engine compartments!),
the little bus seemed to catch its second wind, and off we went to
Gatlinburg.

or Tinsel-Town in the Blue Ridge. it's a tourist trap. pure and simple.
lots of small shops with small inventories and big prices. lots of
blank stares on the faces of the sidewalk population. lots of signs
claiming to save you money, cure your lumbago, and make you popular
with any opposite sex of your choice. oh, and come inside where you
can buy autographed pictures of some country-western-hillbilly singer
i've never heard of. cheap. :)

moving along slowly, we got separated from Ken. but he had said that
they kinda wanted to hang aroun G-burg for a while, so we figured that
was what they were doing. besides, it seemed to be running ok. so Dave
and i struggled along at the posted 25 mph speed limit, until we got
clear of G-Burg ang Pigeon Forge (why would a blacksmith want to make
pigeons?? or are they referring to the tourists as "pigeons"??), and
got onto a 4-lane back to the interstate highway.

stopped somewhere near Athens, TN(?) for supper and a quick gas up and
tranny-check for Dave. i managed to break a tooth on some onion rings
(don't ask: old teeth) so now i've got to go pay the dentist's kid's
college tuition again. :(  but the food was good.

back on the road, and off we go again. didn't stop again until i got
really really really tired and needed some coffee. we stopped at a
Petro truckstop, caffeined up, and came out into the parking lot. there
beside our buses was another bus. the fellow had been heading in the
opposite direction as us, and his engine just sorta ran out of steam
on him. Dave did a valve adjustment on his left bank, and got him
running again. kinda odd, that he would strike out that late at night
with NO tools onboard. oddly enough, he turned out to be one of the
local Tookalookians that the folks i'd met (from Tookalooka) up in NC
had mentioned. a very small world indeed. sort of a real co-inky-dink:
if we'd stopped earlier, or not stopped at all, he'd have missed us
and been stranded. Twilight Zone for Buses!! ;)

go home, showered, crashed. dave wanted to maybe sorta kinda go to a
junkyard nearby, but it was raining so he just shoved off toward home.
he still had about 10-12 hours of driving left.

i was semi-awake, and decided to try to get some email out of the way
(gee, i only had 236 messages, 30 of which were digests!), then i
crashed again. woke up about 1900 that night, did some more email, and
went back to bed. i was tired. i GOTTA get me a cruise control for the
camper!!!! that just jumped up into the highest priority on the to-do
list!! :)

so that's it. sorry about anybody i left out or forgot. but i probably
couldn't see you in the fog/cloud. ;)

joel