After canceling our weekend plans to go backpacking with friends (this becoming a bad habit for us), we had a weekend relatively free to do some things around town. On the top of our list...spending Friday evening on Market Square Mall watching "The Maltese Falcon " on the outdoor screen. We loved Humphrey Bogart as the very cool Sam Spade, working the clues as he solved the murder mystery of the Maltese Falcon. In it's 64th year in release, "The Maltese Falcon" is a timeless classic! Thanks Knox County Library System for making this legendary film apart of Knoxville's free outdoor movie presentation. Of course we began the evening with a #13 pizza from the Tomato Head. Yum, yum....as always.

Today we took our annual car trek to Carver's Apple Barn in Cosby, TN. As lovers of fresh picked apples, we sampled from Carver's assortment in effort to cull out the best of the season's harvest. Overall, we would not rate this a great apple year (in our humble opinion). A couple of our favorites, Pippin, Red Delicious and Fuji were either too tart or too sweet and mushy. I settled on a half bushel of an annual favorite, JonaGold (crisp with a nice blend of sweet and tart), while John couldn't resist the sweet (but mushy) New Galas. We are busy coring, slicing, freezing and dehydrating apples for the winter. In the meantime, I am looking forward to my daily chilled, crisp apple or two...until the half bushel comes to an end :-)


Bushel baskets of apples cover 1/2 of the warehouse. Carver's grows some of the best including Arkansas Black, Granny Smith, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, Macintosh, Fuji, JonaGold, New Gala and Rome.

Fall pumpkins are also a favorite at Carver's...pumpkins for cooking, for decorating and for carving.

With this year's extended hot season in East Tennessee, it is hard to believe that fall has been here for almost a month. Carver's fall presentation of mums, pumpkins, Indian corn, corn husks, jellies and jams (along with the apples) made me anxious for cool, crisp fall weather.

John leaning against the wall of The Brass Lantern in Gatlinburg watching the crowd.

As usual, we capped off our trip to Carver's with a stop at the Brass Lantern in Gatlinburg for a bowl of vegetable soup and skillet of corn bread. With the exception of the dogwood and sassafras, the leaves on the trees in the Smoky Mountains are still as green as they were in August. Even so, Gatlinburg in October is a crowded place to be. We parked on the outskirts of town (to avoid the bumper to bumper traffic) and walked. The soup is always good so the effort was worthwhile.