Away We Go!: Rachel, Chris, and Nathan Hit the Road: From the Hills to the Mountains

The Virginia countryside was a charming landscape of rolling hills and green fields. The Smokies in Tennessee are REAL mountains - as close as anything we've seen in the eastern United States to the massive Rockies, Cascades, and Sierra Madre that we're used to back home on the West Coast. And, we had the pleasure of a front row seat. I know I already posted a photo of the view from our porch, but I can't help doing it again.

These photos show how different the Smokies can look from one moment to the next. Looking out my "office" window truly does feel sometimes like the greatest show on earth. The bottom photo is a great example of how the Smokies got their name. Often, in the mornings, the fog rolls down off the mountain looking for all the world like smoke. Sometimes it settles into the valleys and looks almost like a river or roadway of fog descending from the mountaintops.

Sadly, the town of Gatlinburg is the polar opposite. As soon as you pass through the exit gate of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, you're greeted by a pretty gnarly collection of Vegas-y restaurants (think Margaritaville and Bubba Gump), tourist trap attractions (e.g., the Ripleys Believe it or Not Museum), gun shops, and cotton candy stalls. It's like a little slice of Hollywood, Vegas, or Atlantic City tucked into the foothills of the Smokies.

The National Park System was created, in part, because Americans had seen the way that natural wonders like Niagara Fall could quickly become commercial tourist nightmares. Gatlinburg, unfortunately, comes very close.

But, enough about Gatlinburg. The park was incredible! After several pleasant, but not overwhelming, experiences with eastern parks, we didn't expect much from the Great Smokies. We figured maybe this would be like an extension of Shenandoah. We couldn't have been more wrong!

What we found was an amazingly beautiful range of river-laced and snow-covered mountains, full of charming trails, amazing views, and, thankfully, small crowds! This last part was a real concern because the Smokies are the most visited unit of the National Park system, probably due in large part to location. The one exception to the low-crowd rule was Cade's Cove, a park favorite, where visitors can take a driving tour of the last inhabited village subsumed by the Park when it was created in 1934. The traffic in Cade's cove reminded us a little too much of Los Angeles!