Moab or Bust, but First, Riding Tsali and Tanasi

After months of planning and preparation (you'd think we had never done this before,) we're off on a new adventure--10 weeks from NC to Moab, Utah and back. Our 4-year-old trailer needed a lot of work. David replaced an axle, all the brake assemblies, a drum and all bearings and races. He also had to pull out the plastic shower stall, called a surround, because it was cracked in several places, and replace it with a new one, a task that took about 5 days.

I won't bore you with the entire list, but it was quite extensive. I got about half the trip planned. The morning we left I made two campground reservations while David was hooking up the trailer. I particularly wanted to make sure we had reservations in Albuquerque over 4th of July. It takes us a couple of hours to get the trailer out of the driveway because of its steepness and because he can't put the bikes on until the trailer is at the top of the driveway. All kinds of people were milling about while we were trying to leave, including the mailman, garbagemen, city workers working on sewer lines in the middle of the cul-de-sac, even a couple of women preaching the dangers of smoking and handing out pamphlets titled God's View on Smoking.
We finally left around 12:30 and got to the WalMart in Waynesville around 5.5 hours later without a problem, if you don't include the part where the GPS insisted WalMart was up a steep, narrow road in a residential neighborhood. Nope, not going there. In fact, it was half a mile in the opposite direction.

The following day we went to our campground outside of Bryson City, set up, had lunch and called David's cousin. We met him at his shop where he makes cabinets, doors and other wood products for houses.

Then we all went to Tsali where we met a friend of his and biked the Thompson Loop single-track bike trail. I'm not a single-track biker, so all the rocks, roots, mud puddles, steep ups and downs were challenging for me, but with the help of my great friend, the electric bike-assist, I didn't exactly keep up but made it. The more difficult of the two trails we were biking was behind me, or so I thought. The following day we did another Tsali trail, Right Loop, that some campers had told me was much easier. They were wrong. It was much harder. It was steeper, narrower, rockier and rootier. There were narrow ledges you rode past, steep switchbacks with water and mud at the bottom you splashed through and even a little ledge you jumped over. For experienced mountain bikers it would probably be considered intermediate if not easy, but it was a bit much for me. We passed the first bailout but by the second one, I was more than ready, and maybe David and his cousin were too. It wasn't a piece of cake either, but we made it.
The morning of our departure we went up a long, steep, winding, rutted dirt road to the site where David's cousin plans to build a house on top of a mountain where expansive views of the Smoky Mountains greet you in every direction. It will have a lot of glass, so you can see the views through it.

We left Bryson and drove to Ocoee Whitewater Center in Tennessee and rode Tanasi trails. Well, actually, I followed David up a steep fire trail about a mile and then turned around and found the much friendlier Rhododendron trail, which follows the Ocoee River and was much more to my liking--few rocks, almost no roots or steep hills and beautiful scenery. I took my time and even took some photos.

 Meanwhile David was trudging a couple miles uphill to the Thunder Rock Express where he went barreling down an advanced downhill run, brakes fully engaged, testing his limits. The next day his arms hurt from clutching the handlebars so tightly. When he got back to the trailer I asked him if he liked it. "It was different. My curiosity is satisfied." Mine too. We drove another hour and a half to Chattanooga and arrived at our campground just before 7pm.