My car, Jane, is plain but a good worker. She gets me where I want to go without any fuss about it. We go on adventures together, sometimes going down to Bloomington and other times going beautiful places like Turkey Run State Park, about an hour from Lafayette.
This summer, we went to Cedar Bluff Nature Preserve, about 15 minutes from home.
It was really beautiful.
That’s Jane in the background. I told you she was plain, but don’t tell her that or she’ll get in a huff. Outside doesn’t look like that around here anymore. Drought and fall have taken their toll on the green.
Turkey Run was starting to show the first sights of shriveling up a few weeks ago when I visited it.
Not that you can really tell in that picture, but it was.
My most recent adventure, however, only involved Jane for about 200 miles of the over 1000 miles traveled. My family and I went down to the Smoky Mountains for a long weekend, where the higher parts of the mountains really were starting to look like fall, with fingers of red coming down on the ridges.
Our second hike was almost 9 miles long, so we started at the early hour of 8 AM, Sunday morning at one end of Cade’s Cove.
They don’t call them the Smoky Mountains for nothing.
Before we started, someone (Amanda I think) suggested we take a family photo.
Apparently Jonathan didn’t like it. Since Sunday was October 10, 2010 (10-10-10) we kids decided to jump when the clock hit 10:10 (cause you know, nothing is more enjoyable than saying, “lets do something at 10 10 10 10 10 10” and lose track of the tens.
So we jumped
Apparently mom and dad kissed, but none of us saw that, much less captured it on film (which is fine with us!)
The top of the mountain gave us pretty swell views of the cove
Around this time, though, our guide estimated that we had only gone about a quarter of our hike, and it had taken us a good 2.5 hours. So we stopped taking pictures and practically ran for the next half hour, when we found we were actually more than half done with our hike.
By the end of the hike, we were ready for a big dose of power from peas and we formed a union to make our wishes known to the pea carrier.
Because we partially ran down the mountain, we reached our destination too early and had time to play before our next fun activity (a hay ride in the back of a cut-off semi trailer around Cade’s Cove).
The next day, after we had all killed our legs, feet, toes, anything that helped us climb a mountain, were killed again on another hike. Sure it was beautiful, but we still killed our legs. 
Nearer the end, we found these great vines. If you fell off, you fell down the mountain. Great fun!
But by the end of this hike, the union was pretty determined to get what we wanted and so we went on strike. 
It was a great vacation.
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