Tennessee Research Trip

Book Two of The Pepperman Mystery Series is set in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and The Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The title and cover will be revealed later.

The main character is Earl Helmsly.  Readers told me they liked Glynna Helmsly and her family in Pepperman’s Promise, the prequel to the mystery series. Earl is one of Glynna’s children who was first introduced as a three-year-old with his twin Burl--ornery guys. Pepperman’s Promise covers a span of twenty years and we learn Earl joins the military after high school.

Book Two starts with Earl as a retired Navy SEAL.

Research for the book started with a trip to Tennessee with my wife Liz. First we toured the Cumberland Mountains with her cousins and stayed in a little cabin where nights are extremely dark with only the stars and lightning bugs for illumination.

Liz’s cousins told mountain stories as we drove throughout the area. They showed us a tombstone of a Revolutionary Soldier born in 1765. He was quite young to be a soldier at the start of the war, but lived to be eighty-seven.

Several days later we drove to Gatlinburg, one of the main entrances to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. A thirteen mile drive through the park took us to Newfound Gap, an entrance to the Appalachian Trail. The trail is approximately two thousand two hundred miles long and goes through fourteen states from Georgia to Maine. Records show that over two thousand people hiked the trail in its entirety in 2014. If someone hikes the trail from one end to the other, and turns around and hikes back, it is call a “yo-yo.”  I admire those people, but not something I want to do.  

Fun people crossed our path on this trip. I’ll write about that next time.