After spending the last three years driving north and west (through the longest parts of Texas from where we live), I told David our next trip we were going East and a direction we could get out of Texas in less than three hours vs. the 9-10 we’ve been doing the previous years.
I have a goal to visit all the National Parks, so I landed on The Great Smoky Mountains. Once again we road tripped our way there, and spent time in both Tennessee and North Carolina. Our cabin was in Maggie Valley, NC but most of the tourist/sight seeing things were near Gatlinburg, TN.
I’ll be honest, it rained a lot on this trip. It was a bit of a bummer that we had mostly rainy days during our time there, but we made the most of it and still had a great time. Our favorite part was the cabin we found to stay in. It felt so remote and we were literally on the side of a mountain. We went in early October, and the leaves were just starting to change colors. Our cabin had two different outdoor areas….a patio/deck, and then covered porch. We spent a lot of time on the deck (and even flew our drones for a bit), and I spent almost every morning on the covered porch listening to and enjoying the morning rain. We spent a lot of our time at the cabin and trying to enjoy just being present in the moment.
The Great Smoky Mountains is one of the few national parks that doesn’t charge an entrance fee, so we dove through it almost every day we were there.
We spent a little bit of time in Gatlinburg, but it was very crowded and touristy. David and I both got overwhelmed when we were in this area and we only spent an afternoon actually in the touristy part of Gatlinburg.
Outside the park as we were driving the mountains, I saw a random pull off, and decided to go check it out. We were rewarded with this beautiful waterfall!
On one of our last days of the trip, we had booked tickets on the Rocky Mountain Railroad Train trip. It was again a rainy day, but our train was covered and we enjoyed seeing the country side throughout the area. David loved trains as a boy growing up and this was something fun and different to do. Halfway through the trip, you make a pit stop for about an hour in a small town. We decided to grab lunch at this small tavern called Rivers and Rails Tavern, and the foot was amazing. David and I both agreed that if we had more left on our trip we would have driven back to this place because it was so good.
This was a really nice relaxing trip. We loved that our schedule wasn’t packed full and that we spent time just enjoying where we were, our cabin, being in the mountains, the scenery, etc.
thegreenfieldlife.com 