Blogs from Cumberland Gap, Tennessee, United States, North America

In the posthumous Thomas Wolfe novel You Can't Go Home Again the protagonist is George Webber, a writer ostracized by his home community because of his unflattering portraits of the people of the town. The real-life background was more complicated. Wolfe's first novel Look Homeward Angel was one of the most thinly veiled autobiographies masquerading as fiction. The fictional town was Altamont, but the real-life hometown of Wolfe was Asheville. In his second novel, Of Time and the River, the people of Asheville were not included, and they were even more miffed at their exclusion. Wolfe did not go back to Asheville to visit family for 8 years after the publication of Look Homeward Angel, and barely reconciled with the town before his premature death from neurotuberculosis at age 38. Toward the end of You Can't ... read more

Geo: 36.5913, -83.6615This morning after a quick breakfast we headed to the Cumberland Gap National Park. We decided to call into the visitor centre and we were quickly greated by Ron who worked there. He gave us a map and showed us where we needed to visit.We drove to the first car park and got our treks underway. The one thing Ron forgot to tell us was how high these treks were. After about a mile we got to the bottom of our first adventure. After a gruelling climb up about 2000 feet of hills we reached the tri-state peak. This was a very exciting place in which three seperate states met, these were: kentucky, virginia and tennessee. We began playing round jumping state to state and bridging the gap between them.After we made the descent ... read more