Nearing the End

The last few days of the trip we decided to change our plans around completely. We had originally planned on staying in two tiny state parks, one in South Carolina and one in Georgia, but we got snagged by the beauty of North Carolina and western Georgia and decided to kiss our plans goodbye.

From the Smokies, we descended into a beautiful river gorge not far from Franklin, NC with dramatic waterfalls, steep cliffs, and a pretty narrow road deemed a scenic byway and rightly so. We entered a national forest along the road, and Ryan recognized the name as an ideal fishing spot as touted by his father, the avid fisherman who taught us both.

Soon enough our plans were changed to camping in the beautiful national forest in order to make one last ditch attempt at fly fishing on the trip.

Luckily, it was not in vain.

On the pretty little Tallulah river in northern Georgia, in the Chattahoochee national forest, Ryan and I put our fly fishing prowess to one final test.

Ryan's beauty

At first all we caught were trees and dead leaves, but then Ryan got a bite and pulled in a good sized rainbow for our first triumph of the day, and our first success fly fishing in seemingly forever.

With some lessons from Ryan on my cast (it would have been romantic, with his arms around me showing me how, except for the enormous over-all waders we were both wearing) I started to get the fly further out into the depths of the stream. On one cast, I didn’t notice much of a nibble at all, but when I pulled back to cast again, sure enough a little silver flash almost went flying backwards with my pole before I realized “oh hey! There’s a fish on there!” Sure enough, behold my first fish caught fly fishing ever.

He may be small, but I am still quite proud.

But we weren’t done with that. Ryan managed to catch another little guy, and then, again by some miracle, I caught a good sized rainbow in the rapids of one deep pool. In all my excitement I started reeling him in, although he was putting up a mighty fight against my rod. *Snap!* Completely bewildered and upset, I looked at Ryan with my now loose line and no fish. “I was so focused on teaching you how to catch fish, I forgot to tell you what to do when you actually do catch them” Ryan said laughing. Apparently you’re supposed to let them fight until they tire themselves out before reeling them in. What I feel worse about is that there’s a fish down in the creek somewhere with a hook stuck in his mouth. Sorry buddy!

Now, the four fish that we caught could have made a very nice trout dinner, except that Ryan and I had already bought steak to stir fry for our last night camping and therefore didn’t need more protein, so we released all that we caught. Probably a good thing too since neither of us are particularly knowledgeable about how to clean a fish and we didn’t have internet access to ask Google. They did look pretty tasty though.

That night we decided to scrap our plans to camp in the state park we’d planned on and instead camped on the side of the river, reminiscing and enjoying some beers before a crackling fire and bright stars above. We’ve camped in canyons, deep woods, on mountainsides, in cold weather, hot weather, fog and sunshine. The trip as a whole has been absolutely unbelievable we decided – the best 100 days of our lives. Sure my computer was stolen, I got sick a couple times, and we almost died in the Tetons, but while we knew the trip wasn’t going to be perfect, we have to say it came pretty darn close. After all, if we can count the amount of “big bummers” on one hand, we’d like to think it was a pretty successful trip.

From Georgia, we had just one last stop before heading back to Saint Louis. We decided to finish off the trip with one last city, the heart and soul of country music, Nashville Tennessee. Farewell woods and picnic tables and gravel tent pads! Until next summer – wherever we’ll be then.