Maybe it’s the Midwesterner in me? Or that I’ve been to about 29 states, give or take a few.  Or that I recently found out flying makes me really sick. But long road trips do not phase me. 16-hour drive? Give me a bag of snacks and some drinks and I’ll be ready to go. Throw in that I am very impromptu and up for any type of adventure and it’s a recipe for something. I say something because 9/10 it’s some sort of disaster. 

Its 856 miles from my house to Grand Isle, Louisiana where I currently was. We were preparing to head back home after a week. Me and my friend however decided to make a small detour into Gatlinburg, Tennessee. When I say small I mean that it turned our drive into a 1,078-mile trip home.  We decided to go to Gatlinburg for one thing, Ripley’s Aquarium. It was a Tuesday, in February, and there was a terrible storm coming through. All the roads were flooding and we were about 900 percent sure that death was imminent. But we lived and due to these factors, we had almost the whole aquarium to ourselves. Totally worth it. 

I was able to find my favorite animal, that I had no idea existed till this day. Many people would think it would be a horse or something majestic maybe, but no. It’s a mudskipper. A mudskipper is this gross little fishy thing that can live both in and out of water. They can also climb trees. The best part about them is that they scream at each other when out of the water. You can also buy them online for $30. I don’t know how to take care of one, but my future husband has to be okay with me having a mudskipper in the living room. If I had to guess I’ll probably be able to add that to the list of reasons of why I am not married. 

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On the way home, we decided to yet make another detour. This time to Lexington, Kentucky. What for? To see Cocaine Bear, also known as Pablo EskoBear. To fully appreciate the bear, that has maybe the worst taxidermy job I’ve ever seen (I live in southern Indiana, okay? I’ve seen a lot of taxidermy) you have to know the story. 

As the story goes, drug smuggling Andrew Thornton II, was a narcotics cop, and later lawyer that in his free time smuggled guns and drugs. In 1985 Thornton was smuggling, you guessed it, cocaine in from Columbia, he jumped from his plane and got tangled in his parachute. Embarrassing. His body was found in Knoxville, Tennessee. He was wearing Gucci and had 75 pounds of cocaine in a duffle bag. Three months after that a black bear was found dead in the Chattahoochee National Forest. It is said that the bear over dosed on 40 kilos of cocaine that Thornton had dropped along the way. The bear was stuffed and put in a visitors center in Georgia. Then came a wildfire, and the bear was put in storage, and then Waylon Jennings got it. Then someone in Reno, Nevada bought the bear for $200 when Jennings passed away. The now owners of the bear tracked it down and had it shipped from Reno to Kentucky where it currently resides.

That’s a story and a stuffed bear worth making a detour for. I got a t-shirt that has a picture of the bear with cocaine over its nose, surprisingly enough I have found exactly zero times that shirt is appropriate.