Tennessee New Year

For New Years i went to Tennessee with Karrie and her family. Karrie's family stayed in hotels but we stayed in a cabin about 10 miles outside of Gatlinburg.

Here is the cabin that Karrie and i stayed in. It was really nice and at the same price as a hotel.
I took lots of pictures of the night sky from the back deck.
This is picture was done by using the CHDK software i've used before, it combines around 60 pictures into one. Still not perfect, but i'm getting better. The town of Gatlinburg is on the left.
This is the time lapse video from those pictures. Using my new camera makes a big difference. The Canon S95 lets in a lot more light.

Here are some more pictures i took the next night.


The morning of the second day Karrie and i drove into the Smokey Mountain National Park and hiked on the Laural Falls Trail. It was 2.6 miles round trip and had a rise of 300 feet in elevation.




The falls were really cool and we even climbed off the trail to a rocky area below. That's Karrie way down at the bottom.

I was excited to try my homemade ND filter. The pictures didn't come out perfect, i forgot to take the picture in RAW, it made it a lot harder to fix the colors in Photoshop.

We left the falls after an hour or so, but before leaving the park we stopped at a trail along a river. I tried taking more ND filter pictures.







The next day we went to Ober. There is a road but we took the cable car.
Then went all the way to the top of the mountain on a chair lift.



The view was great.


They had a neat picture up there that explained what you were seeing.
It's a little hard to see but it labeled each peak. For example #6 is Clingmans Dome at 6643 feet.
Here is the view of downtown Gatlinburg from the steps of the aquarium.
We spent an hour there one day.
Got to pet some horseshoe crabs.


Another day we went to Wonderworks. It was a really cool upside-down building in Pigeon Forge. This was a cool 3D painting they had inside. You can't tell how it works until you get near it and realize that it isn't flat.

Gatlinburg at night. The traffic was still pretty busy.
New Years in Gatlinburg. They dropped the ball and shot off fireworks from the space needle.

Elvis and his family were even there.