Homeward bound

 Saturday September 27 2025

On Friday night, we had decided we would get up early and drive straight through on the return trip to our home. It is a distance of +/- 400 miles, which we can easily do in a day. We don’t even try to suppress the beeline syndrome anymore, when we are within a day’s drive of home, we just go. There is no sense fooling ourselves with a tentative overnight stop somewhere, we just go home.

making a beeline for home!

We set an alarm clock for these early departures but don’t really need it as we wake up looking at the clock every hour or so. A little after 3 am Millie asked if I was ready to go and I jumped right out of bed. 

We had prepped the RV the night before for a speedy departure, about all we had to do was bring in the slide-out and disconnect the power cord and by 4 am we were out on the Great Smoky Mountains Parkway headed for Gatlinburg.

My original plan was to beat the tourist traffic in Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg that increases in volume each day until it reaches gridlock. Our next concern was I-40 which is open with only one lane in each direction where it crosses the Appalachian Mountain range.  Several long stretches of the road were washed into the Pigeon River during Hurricane Helene. I don’t think the road will be fully open until sometime in 2026.

interstate 40 after Hurricane Helene

It’s a very good thing we left when we did because as we were leaving it started raining and it rained heavily in Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg until 2 that afternoon. Roads flooded and there was a mud slide that closed the road to Gatlinburg, the very road we had driven on just a few hours before. 

We seemed to be just ahead of the rain, occasionally in it but just as often dry. At about Ashville we left the rain behind and had an uneventful trip home, arriving in early afternoon.