The Great Smoky Mountains National Park
Posted by Donna on September 24, 2009
24 September 2009 – Day 6 of Our Adventure
Slept well… woke up a little after 7 a.m. Got into my running clothes and snuck downstairs to the fitness room barely waking my mother on my way out. Did 2 miles on a pretty creaky treadmill (the emergency off switch was taped in place, the incline feature didn’t work). Got a cup of coffee forthe Motherdear on my way back to the room.
After I showered we had a leisurely breakfast (free) downstairs. At around 9:30-10 a.m. (can’t believe we didn’t look at the clock before we left) we headed for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Yeah!!
Just after we got into the park I saw a couple of Tom turkeys on the side of the road. Cool! Tennessee wild life! I don’t think I mentioned that I saw an owl at the edge of the woods yesterday when we were on the tour of Gettysburg. My first thought was that it was a fake owl… like farmers use… then I thought, “Why put a fake owl in the middle of the woods at a battleground?” So I’ve convinced myself that the owl was real. It really was!
Anyway…
The Great Smoky Mountains! What a beautiful place! To see pictures please check out my Facebook photo album. If you aren’t my FB friend already, go to www.facebook.com and search for me by my e-mail address… donna@donnadoyon.com. You should find me that way.
Anyway… the mountains are beautiful. The trees are huge, the stones and fallen trees are mossy, the air smells fresh and clean even in places where it smelled woodsy and earthy.
The road that we were on goes up and over the mountains from Gatlinburg, TN to Cherokee, NC. We made quite a few photo op stops along the way. We reached the highest point, Clingman’s Dome, at around noontime. We stopped to take pictures, pulled out our books, and sat on a rock for about 30 minutes to read. It was beautiful. One of the things Motherdear and I had talked about doing.
Just when our butts were starting to fall asleep a man approached us and asked if the white Hyundai Sonata was our car. I told him it was an immediately thought we had a flat tire or he hit it or something. Nope. He wanted to let us know that a SNAKE had just slithered beneath it.
EEK!
I leaned back to peer under the car. I didn’t see anything… then it moved… yup, it was a snake. I gathered up my book and my purse looking to see if I was suddenly surrounded by snakes) to get a closer look. Neither the man nor I knew if it was poisonous, but we watched the little guy until he was safely across the road.
Yes, Motherdear and I decided it was time to move on.
We wanted to continue into North Carolina, but traffic was backed up. Cars were turning around in the street. We turned around too. Then we thought… what if there really isn’t anything wrong? We weren’t in a hurry. We turned around again. Got much farther than the first attempt then found out the problem. An accident involving an RV… people were being told that it would take 2-3 hours to clean up the mess. We may not have been in a hurry, but we didn’t want to wait 2 hours to get moving again. We turned around again.
We spent about 3 hours driving around the Smoky Mountains. We didn’t see it all, but we saw a lot. It’s a beautiful mountain range. Definitely worth a visit.
Rather than coming directly back to our hotel, we drove to Pigeon Forge, TN… home of Dolly Parton and Dollywood. It’s a pretty little tourist spot, too. I think Gatlinburg has a bit more charm to it, though. Tomorrow we’ll go downtown and take some pictures of it.
Tonight our plan is to go back to Pigeon Forge for dinner at the Dixie Stampede. It’s a Dolly Parton dinner attraction. Should be fun.
And that’s been our day so far. Right now Motherdear is reading her book while I’ve been uploading pictures and writing this entry. It’s amazing how much time it takes to do all this stuff. But it’s a nice record of our activities.
I hope all is well with you.
Hugs,
–Donna
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