What I Did On My Summer Vacation

I'm back! Didja miss me? Didja, didja, huh, huh?? We got home a couple of hours ago and I decided sharing some photos with the other members of blogland sounded like more fun than figuring out what to eat for supper. We had a great time in the Smokies. We stayed in Banner Elk, on the North Carolina side --- first time we'd ever been to that particular community. We stayed at a resort called Blue Ridge Village. These are my friends Marge and Diane, as we walked around checking the place out that first afternoon. I told Diane I was going to tell the world she was drinking from a glass in each hand, but I will confess that one of those wine glasses was mine and she just held it while I took the photo. These are the guys, fishing at the lake you can see in the previous photo. It was supposedly a stocked fish pond, but I've circled J's big catch of the weekend. Ahem. We mostly just hung out and visited and talked, but we also did a little shopping and sightseeing. My favorite place we went was the Mile High Swinging Bridge at Grandfather Mountain. Only four of us went --- Gerald, Marge, Amy, and me. Johnny and Jimmy went in a futile search for flea markets, while Diane and Emma (her granddaughter) went swimming. Here are some photos from Grandfather Mountain: This is me standing at the edge of the swinging bridge. The sign says the elevation is 5,305 feet. Gerald, Amy, and I went across, while Marge waited on this end. She didn't like the idea of the bridge moving around. This photo shows the rocks people were climbing around on after they got off the far end of the bridge. There were no railings or anything, just a bunch of naked rocks, so I figure they were either really brave or really crazy, or both. When we got to the other end of the bridge, we climbed around the rocks a little too, but didn't go out all the way to the end. We kinda thought we would (yeah, I guess that makes me either brave or crazy too), but about the time I took this pic... ...of Gerald and Amy, we saw a little girl who couldn't have been more than about 5 years old take a tumble and come within about two feet of tumbling right on off the top of the mountain. Seriously. It was at that point that we thought maybe Marge was the smartest person in the group and we maybe should head on back. After I took the above photo, I turned around and took this photo so you can see how far from the bridge we'd gone before we turned around. And this horrid-looking shot of me is to show you a) how windy it was in the center of the bridge and b) that I love playing with my camera so much that I turned loose of the railing in the center of a mile-high swinging bridge in order to take an "arms stuck out" bad self-portrait shot. Yeah, baby! This is a photo of Marge and Amy and some people I don't know in front of Split Rock. Would you believe some people were squeezing into that little crack and walking through the rock? ACK! Not me. No way. I'd LIVE on the swinging bridge before I'd squeeze into that rock. (shudder) Because no DebR Trip Photo Shoot would be complete without the Shoe Shot, here's the photo I took of Emma, Amy, and me. Aren't Emma's pink beady slides just Too Cute? (They both thought I was crazy to want to take a picture of their feet, but they were nice enough to go along with it.) And finally, here we all are in the condo we rented. The Banner Elk Gang: (front) Gerald, Marge, DebR; (back) Johnny, Emma, Amy, Jimmy, Diane