Beautiful Detour

See any detour as an opportunity to experience new things. – H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

If you have been following me for the last few weeks now, you might have noticed that my posts have been primarily black and white photography. Most of those posts were focused on various photos I had taken through out the previous year. I took the month of December to reflect on many of the great moments that had happened. We went camping for the first time in almost two years. I visited the town where I graduated college and met my wife. I witnessed some beautiful sunsets, sunrises, and saw quite a few awesome waterfalls. I saw more of my hometown and took various amazing photos of it. It’s important to look back over the previous year. I like to see how things went better, and analyze different ways I can improve as well.

We just returned from a trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. It has been over 13 years since we last visited the area. In fact, the last time we were there my wife and I were child free. It had been a while. On the way there we saw on the GPS that there was a accident further up the road right past the North Carolina border in Tennessee. The map redirected us to drive around the closed road to ride through the Blue Ridge Parkway to The Great Smoky Mountain National Park. This might sound odd, but the Blue Ridge Parkway is my favorite road to drive. Every part of the road is an amazing view of the mountains. I could pull over at every spot of it and take pictures. While I didn’t have the time to do this on the way to Gatlinburg, I did pull over at the first one I saw. I pulled over at the Plott Balsam Overlook. This was one of the those detours that was worth it. I snapped a few shots and got back on the road. The worst part about this detour was we couldn’t find a single restroom between the Parkway and where we were staying. I had to go. We saw a few visitors centers at the national park, but the parking lots were full of cars. So we had to just keep going. I had to go so bad I was sweating. When we were only 5 minutes from the house we were staying at I couldn’t take it anymore. I stopped at the first spot I could pull over at safely, and I think you know what happened from there. The drive was still amazing, and I went back to the national park later that week in order to take more photos.