8 of us rented 2 cars, booked a mountain suite and started our exploration!! :D
Driver #1 KS
Ben was driver #2 for the car. Thank you drivers for renting the cars and enduring the long drives through dark highways and creepy roads!!!
I'm not joking about creepy roads. One of the reasons why we took 23454654 million years to reach Smoky Mountains was because we ended up in the most deserted place ever! So, the initial plan was to go get some groceries from the Walmart nearest to Bryson City cuz we were intending to have a BBQ on the 2nd night. We sourced for the address from Walmart's store locator webpage and used a GPS to guide us there. It was pretty much nightfall and we found ourselves driving into a god-knows-where place that's ABSOLUTELY secluded with no trace of civilisation at all!!! All that we saw at where Walmart was supposed to be was a random house, a car parked in front and a scarecrow right next to it IN ALMOST COMPLETE DARKNESS. I swear to god I thought I saw a dead corpse for 1.2984 seconds. It was dark, we were behind schedule and hungry so we abandoned the plan and go hunt for dinner instead!
Something caught up with Chun Wui/Jake's car (which Rebecca and Louise was in) so they were 1 hour behind us. But they should be happy they didn't make a wasted trip to the intended-Walmart-place. We packed dinner for them as well and proceeded to Nantahala Resort (where our mountain suite is) to meet up with them!
As trusting as we were, instead of learning from our previous lesson to not blindly follow the maps and addresses we find online, we overshot our destination for bout 2 miles(?) only because the GPS told us we weren't there yet. When we backtracked, we realised that we drove past the damn signboard with our destination name written on it. -__- I would say that we had an adventurous drive (maybe more adventurous than we would've liked) to Smoky Mountains!
After several bummers, we finally got to our mountain suite!!!!
The girls' room
Yes pool table! Not like we utilised it a lot though...
The guys'!
Our mini stash before actual grocery shopping.
Look who the couch potatoes are!
Group photo to celebrate our safe arrival!
The view right outside our suite!
On the second day, we embarked on our hiking journey!
I got these booties for $1 @ Walmart!!! It was on clearance and it's actually XL of kids' size. Not really good hiking shoes but I really didn't wanna dirty my other shoes.
I didn't take much good photos 'cuz....
1. There were pretty much just trees and............................more trees.
2. I almost died.
Ok I'm just kidding about the second part. There were pretty much very elevated slopes and we had to keep going but I still conquered them all!! It wasn't as bad as what happened to me in Krabi when I intended to climb up the steepest stairs I've seen in my entire life, where I felt dizzy only 10 minutes into the climbing and I almost blacked out. I can't figure out what went wrong maybe the amount of oxygen was too thin or something?? Cuz I remembered my limbs feeling numb and I was breaking into cold sweat.
That had left me a pretty bad experience and I was actually quite afraid of hiking again in such high altitude. But I made it!!! In fact, it was a pretty good workout imo!
We were all FAMISHED after the hike and so set off to lunch we go!!
Dropped by just to take some pictures.
We had Bojangles for lunch, which is really just boring fast food. Bryson City is incredibly small. The only things they had were: MacDonalds', PizzaHut, Arby's, Bojangles and gas stations....
After lunch, we had to complete our groceries shopping which we didn't the day before. The nearest Walmart was about 30-45-min drive away (not including the non-existent one). And guess what???? When we reached, we realised that the Walmart was closed down in 2012. -____- How many times can this happen to us, really?
Fortunately, Ingles, which was another grocery store, was right beside the non-operational Walmart. It was a tough journey trying to get our BBQ food. We did happy grocery shopping and..........
taa-daaaaaaaa! BBQ time!!!
And I came up with an idea to make some fruits parfait!!
Later that night, we sat around the dining table, had some heart-warming conversations and played some games so losers of every round will do some dishes! This was the most efficient game I've ever played.
I only took a picture of Ben doing the dishes because he was the LAST and the MOST DIFFICULT person to do the dishes. We eventually made him do it muahahahahaha!
The third day, we went water rafting on Nantahala River!
It was pretty chill till the last part of crazy waves (which was what I enjoyed the most).
After which, we set off to take some pretty pictures!
Evidence of how hungry we were: Louise came out of the car hugging Doritos with nacho cheese in her hand.
Evidence 2: Ben and Jake devouring the chips
Some awesome pictures before we set off!
A picture of Navin getting a HUGE splinter. How adventurous can we be?
Since Ashville was on the way back to Chapel Hill, we decided to pop by for lunch!
Downtown of Ashville!
Had to take a picture of this to prove that we've been to Ashville...........even if it's just for lunch.
Ok and that's it for our adventure!
And evidently again, I am a city girl given the amount of pictures I took of Ashville as compared to the amount of pictures I took of the trees during the hike, given the short amount of time I was in Ashville. Oh wells.........
Ending off with my favourite photo from the road trip!
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