Day 10 - Townsend, TN

Monday, May 16, 2022

Weather - High 81 and partly cloudy with a little rain, but we didn't care because we never left the cabin!

Steps - Shaun: 2,654, Shannon: 31 (but Shannon was obviously not wearing her watch)

Varmints - One extraordinarily large arachnid and a Northern Harrier (we think), which is a kind of hawk

We were supposed to go to Clingman's Dome today, but we decided to take the day off because it was supposed to rain.  We did a bunch of nothing.  Shannon slept until 11:00 and I read my book on the back porch.  Afterwards, well, Shannon ate breakfast for lunch, and then we BOTH proceeded to read on the back porch.

It's really beautiful on the porch, and the birds were singing like crazy.  We're embarrassed to admit that we don't know a whole lot of birds by their songs, so we decided to take matters into our own hands and learn some bird songs.  We found an app called Merlin from the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology that can listen to birds when they're singing and identify them for you.  It can also help identify a bird you've seen just based on the answers to 5 questions. And it had tips and tricks on how to better identify birds by focusing on 4 key features of their appearance and location.  The part I liked best about the Merlin app was a teaching tool where it presents a sonogram of the bird's song to help you visualize and categorize it.  They even had a little quiz where you had to guess which sonogram came from the bird in question, and they even showed you which birds were the wrong answers.  I learned a lot from Merlin in my hours and hours on the back porch, so it wasn't a completely wasted day.

After a few (or maybe several) hours, Shannon looked down from her book and said, "Holy crap!  Check out this spider!!!"  Seriously, other than the tarantulas I've seen in Arkansas on Mt. Nebo, this was the biggest spider I've ever seen.  Check it out!

It's hard to determine the size based on this picture
but she was about 2 1/2 inches long, including her legs

We looked this bad boy up, and we think she's called a Dark Fishing Spider (or another kind of fishing spider), and the reason we think it's a she is because the females are much bigger than the males, and she was every bit of 2-3 inches wide with her legs.  Needless to say, we swiftly vacated our back porch sanctuary for the rest of the day!

We decided to rent a movie from Amazon Prime that we'd been trying to see for some time now called Uncharted with Antonio Banderas, Tom Holland (the current Spiderman), and Mark Wahlberg.  It was a treasure-hunting story based on a video game, so, naturally, we weren't expecting an Academy Award winner or anything.  It was okay and certainly worth the $5.99 rental fee; Shannon gave it a 5.0 and I gave it a 6.5.  Obviously, Shannon has much more discerning taste than I do!

After the movie, we moved on to our second attempt at doing a puzzle.  The first one we tried was a 2,000-piece puzzle that we had found at one of the stores in Knoxville, but we'd had it on the table staring at us for 4 days.  Shannon had tried to get it organized, but it was a bunch of stained glass windows and doors, and we decided that it just wasn't meant to be on this trip.  Maybe over Christmas we'll tackle it.  Instead, we pulled out the National Parks puzzle, which was really fun and pretty easy to complete even though it was still 1,000 pieces (we don't lower ourselves to anything less, doncha know?).  Anyway, we started and finished it in 4 hours, which is pretty fast for us.  Here's a picture for your viewing pleasure:

So there you have it, our very low key break in the middle of our Smokies trip.  Tomorrow we will face our toughest hike called Andrew's Bald which is accessed from the Clingman's Dome parking lot.  We also plan to hike up the half-mile ascent to the Clingman's Dome Observation Tower, and travel from the north of the park all the way to the southern border.  Wish us luck!