All right, let us do this vacation recap thing!

Jon and I left Chapel Hill on Thursday morning to drive the three-ish hours to Grandfather Mountain which is near Linville, North Carolina.  The Grandfather Mountain Stewardship Foundation has been running some short commercials on the Travel Channel lately, and a bit of Googling showed that it wasn’t too far from the bed and breakfast we were staying at in Butler, Tennessee.  The mountain is 5,946 feet tall and is one of the highest points of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The mountain is also part of a state park and there is plenty to do.  You pay at the entrance ($15 per person) and are given a CD to listen to as your progress  up the mountain.  The disc has bluegrass music and a sonorous old man telling you about the mountain’s history and nature and other things.  One of the first sites you pass as you ascend the mountain is the playing fields for the Highland Games.  We had just missed the games, which are played in the second weekend of July.  That’s a bummer, because we love kilts.

So the first notable geologic site we passed were the Split Rock and the Sphinx Rock, two giant, billion year old boulders that are perched alongside the road.  So we got out and took some pictures with the giant and old rocks.

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