Noah's Ark needed.

The South has been under a depression for the last week, which does not seem to want to move, so we have had torrential rain for most of the time for the last 7 days. Everything is damp and muddy. There are flood warnings all over, but we should be OK as our friends home is half way up a mountain.
Saturday dawned dry, if overcast, so we went up to Cherokee where there was a Mountain Festival at a centre where they have reconstructed a farm from buildings taken from the land before they made the Great Smokey National Park. It was very interesting as folks were dressed in costume and doing things like bark tree basket making, sorgum milling, making molasses, making hominy and making brooms. For our English friends and family, sorgum is a kind of cane sugar which was grown widely in the South. They would harvest it, then squeeze the juice out between rollers turned by a mule or horse. The juice was then boiled in several vats over fire to reduce it to a syrup - molasses. It was used in many recipes. Hominy is made from dried corn which is boiled in lye ( lye was made by passing water through the collected ashes from the fires) thus removing the hard outer shell. Then it is boiled for hours in water, changed several times, to cook and soften it. Very bland taste, but very nutritious. It must have been a very hard life living on one of these farms.

We then went into Cherokee Town itself. It was not really our cup of tea - too commercialised and touristy. When you'd been in one shop you'd seen what was in all - mostly tourist tat. Cherokee is on the Cherokee Indian Reservation and we would have been quite interested to go to the museum but we had run out of time. We may go later. It started raining at about 4.30 and hasn't stopped since - 24 hours!!!
Sunday
We went to a new church for Jay and Christy - they have only moved up here from Florida about 2 months ago and are still trying out Churches to see which is the right one for them to belong to. It was a good sermon and the worship was good too, shame that the people seemed too shy to come and welcome us!! Only one guy came to speak to us - I found that a bit off putting.
Jay, Christy and Terry are watching American football on the TV busy supporting Jay and Christy's team - Pittsburg Steelers. I cannot understand American Football - no matter how many times Terry has tried to explain it.
It's raining water and acorns on the trailer roof - we are partly under an oak tree!
The bad news is that The Steelers came second.