When we arrived back to the campground last night around 11:00 p.m., we discovered that the large party of deaf teenagers (possibly early 20-somethings) who had moved in (with three cars and at least two tents) to the spot next to us, may not have been able to hear, but they could make an enormous amount of noise. They milled around their site screaming at the top of their lungs until well after midnight. They were evidently quite drunk (I heard retching noises at least twice), and whatever it was that was either entertaining or annoying them was causing them to shriek. At one point I wondered whether I ought to go get the number for the after-hours ranger and report a potential mass-murder. AND the car alarm on one of the fleet of vehicles went off twice and the car horn honked for some time until the flashing lights pierced someone's alcoholic fog enough to make him or her shut it down. They were violating numerous campground rules—two vehicle limit per site, a strict ban on alcohol, and a noise ordinance, which, signs tell us, is strictly enforced! Ha ha. We have not seen a ranger come by in two days. We were in the process of locating the number this morning to call and complain when the whole crowd started packing up. We figured that no one would bother following up on a complaint if the party is already gone, but I think I will write a letter when we get home and suggest that more serious oversight is necessary in the park.

It started raining early (despite the weather channel’s claims that there was zero percent chance of rain before 1:00, after which rain is likely), so we packed up and bailed out early. It actually only rained for a few minutes, so Tim decided to chance it and take the hike that the park brochure advertises as being the most rigorous one, while I headed into town to take care of more mundane tasks like buying ice, getting gas, and working on this blog. I picked him up about 10:30, after which we cruised back through the campground just to be sure that the shriek brigade had indeed cleared out (it had). We decided to explore the options for places to have our picnic lunch, and after a brief sojourn to Duck Island (where I was looking in vain for the geocache the other day), we headed into Kingsport to a park along the river listed in the AAA guide as being free and having picnic tables. "Picnic tables" seems to have been a bit of an exaggeration, but we did find one, and we sat down to enjoy our turkey and cheese and tomato sandwiches, only to have it start raining in earnest in about 10 minutes. We hoofed it back to the car, me still noshing on half a sandwich as we walked, and we finished our picnic from the front seat, watching the Canada Geese swimming happily around in the river.

After lunch, we headed to Blountville, between here and Bristol, where the Appalachian Caverns are located. We already had this planned as a rainy day contingency. A little rain cannot stop us! We have toured a number of caves and caverns over the years, most memorably a cave in Alabama where Kerri the cave tour girl told us that although other caves do not tell the truth, her cave does, and the truth is that this cave (and all others) was formed 4,000 years ago during Noah’s flood. That experience was snarkingly documented on another travel blog site which is, alas, now defunct. You can just try to imagine our complete astonishment to hear this anti-science sentient trotted out in all seriousness as unarguable fact. I mean, we know that some people believe that; we had just never met any before. We thought that it was entirely possible that we might encounter a similar sentiment here, but no such thing. We were the first two customers of the day, and we were treated to a private tour by a young guy (maybe 30?) who encouraged us to be adventurous and explore several off-trail sections (which we did), crawl through numerous small tunnels (which we did not), and climb on the back of their cave mascot, the frozen dragon (again, no, sorry). He also hinted a large number of times that he loves to take pictures, and he pointed out so many “great place”s for a couple’s picture that we eventually caved in (haha) and let him take one at the “heart of the cave” formation.

When he mentioned the age of the cave, it was with a rather elegant dodging of the question. He told us that one formation was about 75,00 years old “If you accept that geologic timeline.”  I got the impression that he himself does, but that he frequently runs into paying customers who do not. Given his range of clientele, I thought that was rather deftly handled.

The tour was actually rather interesting; we not only got to see bats and fish and a giant Alligator Snapping Turtle (these latter two come into the cave from the outside and are not permanent residents, though given the temperature of the water they are not supposed to survive at all, leading a large party of scientists to come down and investigate the claim that turtles can be seen in cave waters. Fortunately, for the purpose of keeping scientific inquiry on its toes, four turtles showed up that day to confound the biologists), but we also saw something which we have never seen in any other cave: a phenomenon the guide called “cave diamonds.”  Apparently because of the humidity in the cave, water droplets form in a wide expanse over much of the cave ceiling, and they glitter in the light. It’s quite a striking phenomenon. I tried to take some pictures, but they don’t really do it justice, of course. The cave also has numerous outlets to the outside—so many that updrafts actually form, and the temperature, unlike all the other caves we’ve visited, which tend to boast a constant temperature year-round of something in the upper 50’s, fluctuates from the upper 30’s in the winter to the lower 70’s in the summer. Live and learn.

We are now in a lull before heading to the drive-in which, we are hoping, does not get rained out. We shall be seeing the enthralling latest version of Jurassic Park.  I am happy to report that I have managed to miss all the previous incarnations of this particular Hollywood dynasty, and I have to agree with Julia that a fourth movie is pretty suspicious: Seriously? Who would fund yet another attempt to populate some sort of tourist adventure with reconstituted dinosaurs after the first three disasters? Still, we are here, the drive-in is here, and we aren’t going to get back to try again any time soon (and even if we were, we could wait years for a movie we actually wanted to see!).

En route to the drive-in, we drove through the historic downtown in Elizabethton, TN. This is a classic late 19th/early 20th century town with a park at the center. This one has a river running through the middle of town and an old covered bridge over the river. This bridge is now the center of the park, and they have all sorts of "covered bridge" events--concerts and so on. While we were wandering around there, some people were feeding the ducks off the walkway, and the scene was pretty funny. Every duck and Canada Goose for MILES was swimming madly toward these people--I don't know how the word gets out!--including some ducks which were downstream of the little waterfall, and swimming madly upstream to try to get to where the food was. They managed to scramble up on the bank and cross the divide on foot, but the funny part was that they were quacking insanely the whole way. It sounded for all the world like "Wait for us! Wait for us! Wait for us! Wait for us!"

We also stopped for a geocache right there at the visitor's center (mainly because it was 150 feet from where we were and because it was supposed to have a travel bug in it. It did not. A travel bug, for those of you who were wondering madly, is a little gizmo that has a code on it. You look up the code on the Internet and the page tells you where the bug is to go. Each finder is supposed to log the bug on its website then move it along to another cache. Unfortunately, they disappear on a regular basis. Aren't you glad you didn't ask?)

We got to the drive-in an hour before the gates open, but there were already a half-dozen cars in front of us; by the time the gates did open, there were approximately 50 cars already waiting--on a Sunday night. Very popular place. We've been to 35 drive-in theaters in the last seven years, and I think this one gets the award for the coolest marquee. I posted photos and a little video of it lit up--they've kept it in perfect condition. It was a nice theater; smaller than some we've been to, but nicely graded and in an attractive setting. The family which owns the theater was also very nice.

The movie, on the other hand, was pretty darn bad. It was Jurassic World, and I will begin by freely admitting to have managed (gee, I wonder how?) to miss the first three films in this series, including the famous Jurassic Park. So maybe there is something here that I am missing, but basically I thought that the "story" was just silly. I will post here my list of the five stupidest aspects of the movie; the difficulty was honing it down to five. Trust me: I could have posted 25. I will also warn you that there are SERIOUS SPOILERS here. If you haven't seen the movie and are just waiting for the right moment to go see it and identify all the stupid stuff for yourself, or if you just LOVE the whole Jurassic series, I suggest you stop here.

Stupid Element #5: Seriously? After three previous failed attempts to bring dinosaurs back from extinction, all of which resulted in rampaging dinosaurs eating people, someone would FUND a dinosaur amusement park? No possible way. The liability insurance alone would be astronomical--if you could get it, which you couldn't.

Stupid Element #4: A 1990s Jeep that has been improbably stored in some sort of shed ever since Jurassic Park once held sway on this very same piece of land (a WHOLE stupid element could be expanded here!) just needs a little dusting off of the battery and some twisting of wires by a girl-happy teenager and his odd little brother (maybe 9?) to run perfectly at high speed, the better to use as an escape vehicle? And it apparently had a full tank of gas? And the gas still worked? Don't make me laugh.

Stupid Element #3: No self-respecting dinosaurs would behave this way. Or even non-self-respecting ones. I have a list of complaints here, so perhaps this is cheating, but practically everything the dinosaurs did was dumb. So here we have a massive beast, pretty much the same size as a T-Rex, only it is preternaturally intelligent. And unbelievably (literally) knowledgeable. We are required to believe that she could (and did): a) scratch massive scars into a 40' wall so that the people would think she escaped her paddock (if she could make scars all the way up, why didn't she just escape the paddock that way?); b) change color to camouflage herself in the trees etc. in her paddock (an ability ostensibly explained by the inclusion of tree frog DNA in her primordial soup), c) alter her thermal signature so that the humans could no longer get a reading and would think she was not in the enclosure (the ability to alter the thermal signature explained by Cuttlefish DNA [Cuttlefish???]; the knowledge that such a trick was needed is NOT explained). We are required, furthermore, to believe that all of these things happened simultaneously, and for the very first time ever on this one afternoon. THAT means that all of these little tricks must have been conscious and deliberate, and the plot was hatched completely without practice.   So I-Rex apparently knew about the technology the humans were using to read thermal signatures (how?), AND could control her camouflaging ability, even though the tree frogs who provided the DNA which allowed for this skill simply change in response to environmental factors, no deliberate planning involved. We are FURTHER asked to simply accept the fact that I-Rex "kills for sport" as the hunk of the show put it, because. (She rampaged around the island killing everyone and everything she encountered, even though she wasn't hungry--which we deduce from the fact that she ate the first three or four humans she killed and didn't eat the dozen or so Brontosauruses she killed.) Maybe tree frogs and cuttlefish are natural born killers for sport. Who knows? We don't, because this implausible behavior trait was never explained. This is a trait, furthermore, that was evidently shared by pretty much all the other dinosaurs. Certainly we are led to believe that the Velociraptors will hunt down and kill I-Rex just because they are ordered to (even though they weren't trained to be hunters, but rather to stop chasing pigs when told to and to eat rats when told to by hunk man). And, in the denouement, we discover that T-Rex will battle I-Rex just 'cuz, and then the big dinosaur in the water tank will leap up and enter the fray, again, just 'cuz. (I imagine that this problem is one which extends back into the early days of the Jurassic franchise, which just exacerbates stupid element #5. "Gee. These dinosaurs just like to kill people because they can. Let's make some more."  Riiiiiiiigggghhhht.)

Stupid Element #2: We're supposed to believe that the Velociraptors, having found in the behemoth Indominus Rex, a relative to whose aid they readily went only minutes before, suddenly change sides and turn on their giant cousin, sacrificing their lives to save Chris Pratt and his pals, just because Chris Pratt did what? Petted one of them and took off its headgear? Yeah. Okay. Sure.

Stupid Element #1--the stupidest thing in the whole movie: The chick of the show, a boring bureaucrat, suddenly turns in to a fearless dinosaur killing machine. But that's not the stupid part. The stupid part is that she spends the ENTIRE movie in what appear to be 4" spike heels, and she spends most of that time running in them. Running over concrete, through grass, through mud, upstairs, downstairs, in my lady's chamber. She can run faster wearhing 4" spike heels than a genetically engineered dinosaur that can run 40 or 50 miles an hour. (Technically, we are told the Velociraptors can run 40 or 50 miles an hour, but the Indominus Rex keeps right up with them.) The hunk man of the show actually even points out how stupid this stupid element is by telling her that she's wearing stupid shoes, but there they are, still on her feet at the end of the movie, and we're supposed to believe that she managed all that running in those paeans to contemporary fashion. I can much more readily believe that someone would fund yet another bound-to-be-catastrophic dinosaur amusement park.

I could go on. But I won't. If you want more snark, I HIGHLY recommend this review, from the New York Times. That reviewer said it all and better than I could.