60. Great Smoky Mountains-Little Pigeon River

Date: August 26, 1989
Age: 12

Today we drove over Tennessee to raft down the Ocoll River. Very exciting. Tonight we'll have to do some work.
Love, Dad

While technically this was a business trip, my dad and his close colleagues used to go whitewater rafting every summer for a span of years, through "Deliveranceland," and he'd call it. I completely forgot about this until I found a spate of postcards from various years, all from the Smoky Mountains. It sounded like a lot of fun.

My mother claims that my dad used to bemoan the fact that she wasn't interested in doing any adventurous vacations like these--but I think that's just because she wasn't into scuba diving, which is one of his passions. And yet, she has spent a week camping and whitewater rafting down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, as well as been on a cattle drive in Wyoming. A cattle drive!