cook-sew-smile: The Smokies!

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

The Smokies!

Howdy from Tennessee!

I decided to take a little break from cooking and sewing, so here we are seeing the Smoky Mountains for the first time. It's breathtakingly beautiful, as you can see. So take a minute to enjoy what we are blessed to be experiencing. The first pic is sunrise from our cabin. Boy, let me tell you...getting to this cabin was no joyride! Talk about steep, curvy and narrow....my husband was ready to turn around (if there was room to do so) and go back the way we came! But we persevered and made it just fine. Coming and going is always tricky because you cannot see around the hairpin turns, but fortunately there's not much traffic.

from our cabin's deck

This is our first trip to a National Park and it's a fabulous experience. Must see to be believed! The visitor's centers are wonderful and informative with Nature Centers and movies of how the Park came to be, etc. We set out to walk a trail and somehow ended up on the Newfound Gap road that crosses the entire park, north to south! 50+ miles of rather slow-moving traffic, but wow! What a ride! So glad we did it. There are lots of places to park for pic opportunities...which is where these pics were taken.

Finding a trail that would suit 2 "older" people that aren't used to hiking very much was not an easy task, so now we had to just follow this very long road (50 miles of slow, slow driving with lots of turn-offs to park and take pics) and see if we could find another trail suitable for us.

Turns out that near the end of that a road was a perfect trail for us...we even saw a bear run across our trail up ahead (no pic, though...but trust me - you don't want to get that close anyway!) It ran up another hill which was fine with us. We met some really nice families that we ended up walking most of the way with. They had several children with them which we were glad for after seeing that bear. Families have kids. Kids make noise. Bears don't like noise...noise is good!