"I gotta get this thing out of my car": Gatlinburg honeymooners encounter a black bear

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Around 7:30 a.m. Wednesday, Blake and Katie Odgers were enjoying their honeymoon in their Gatlinburg cabin when they heard a honking noise coming from their Jeep.

The Jeep’s windows are tinted, so Blake investigated further by inching closer to the driver’s side window when he “came face-to-face with the open mouth of an angry black bear,” he recalled.

“Adrenaline kind of kicked in and my first thought was ‘I gotta get this thing out of my car,' so I try to open the door and his weight being right up against the door kept it from opening so I had to go back and actually pull on it.”



The bear moseyed around before taking off across the street, up the mountain and out of the couple’s eyesight.

“He tore everything on the inside to shreds. The crazy part was the outside was completely unblemished. We still have no idea how he got in because there’s zero external evidence.”



Katie Odger’s parents live in north Georgia, about three hours away from the Odgers’s retreat in Tennessee, and were able to bring a car over so the newlyweds could continue their honeymoon.

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