This Labor Day Weekend, my dad and I decided to take my Jeep across the Foothills Parkway in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

If I was an Enneagram 3, I would have been stressed out by trying to cram in the nearly dozen items I planned for our itinerary. Instead, I am an Enneagram 6; meaning I overplanned and overprepared, but I am happy to just accomplish some of the tasks on the list.

So we ended up doing 3 of the 11 items: We found and drove across the entire Foothills Parkway. We stopped for dinner at a true German restaurant. And we stayed overnight in an RV.

It’s important to my wife that we stay in a nice place anytime we travel. But personally, I’d be happy staying at a Motel 6.

Even though she wasn’t even going on the trip, she talked me into staying an an Airbnb RV; since it was the same price as the cheapest motel she could find.

It’s funny because I had just recently looked back on the lyrics to a song I wrote 4 years ago, called “Fort Payne, Alabama“, which sort of predicted this:

“If you called me Mother Nature’s son, I’d take it as a compliment – I’d trade a Lexus for an RV, a mansion for a tent.”

I’ve accepted that in life, things seldom work out the way you plan them. So you plan ahead- and then you just wing it, when it doesn’t go as planned.

Clearly, that is evidenced by the fact we didn’t get around to visiting the majority of the stops on our trip; including Top of the World, Tennessee.

But fundamentally, the only thing that mattered is that we had a fun adventure together. And that’s exactly what we did.

I suppose for next year, we shall try again to find and visit the mysterious town of Top of the World, Tennessee.

It had served as the reference point for us finding the very elusive start of the Foothills Parkway.

Plenty more left to explore based on this year’s agenda!