Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Wow, so I'd planned on doing a post last week about our trip before we left, but MY GOODNESS last week was insane!  Kevin and I both only worked Monday thru Wednesday (we left for our trip on Thursday morning), but I swear we'd both worked over 40 hours for the week by the end of Wednesday. It was crazy busy.... But we were VERY excited to go on our trip and unplug for a few days! We left bright and early (well, actually, DARK and early...) on Thursday morning, and we drove all the way down to the Gatlinburg, TN entrance of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I don't know how many of you have heard of Gatlinburg, TN... but take my advice and DON'T go there. It's ridiculously awful. But, we drove through there as quickly as we could and entered the National Park!  We were excited to make our way to our campsite!  It had been about 10 hours of driving.

We found a great campsite that was pretty spacious and secluded, and we were excited to set everything up and then relax after our long day of travel. We could hear the river from our campsite, which was soooo peaceful! We brought our hammock, and we were able to just rest and relax for the rest of the evening. It got quite chilly in the evening once it got dark, but it was toasty warm with our campfire! That night for dinner we kept it simple: hot dogs roasted over the campfire. And s'mores, of course!  It was a really great night.

Our hammock!  

Our tent!

Our new canopy to give us shade at the picnic table!  It was supposed to rain on our trip (but it didn't rain until our drive home!), so we brought the canopy so we could stay dry. It ended up being great for making sure we didn't sunburn though! ;) 

We slept so great that night, and woke up in the morning feeling incredibly refreshed and excited for a day of hiking. Unfortunately, the first and second hikes we'd wanted to do that morning ended up being closed for winter... which was very confusing to us since it is definitely Spring by all calendars, and it was like 70 degrees that day... So, that was weird and a bummer.  But, we drove to a lookout area, where there were some AMAZING views of the Great Smoky Mountains! Such a beautiful area. 

The Great Smoky Mountains! 

This sign was there at the viewpoint! Pretty cool. 

After spending some time at the viewpoint, we drove to the parking area for the Laurel Falls hike. It was a really nice hike, and the waterfall was beautiful!!

A cool cave on the hike! It had a bit of a waterfall inside it. 

A nice view during the hike! 

Laurel Falls! 

 

Me and Kevin in front of Laurel Falls! We were hoping for a bit more of the Falls in the picture, but the guy taking the picture didn't understand... Oh well :)

After Laurel Falls, we went to one of the Visitors Centers and wandered around there a bit. They had a nice video showing the history of the Great Smoky Mountains, and they had a little museum and a store, and then there was also a hike to another waterfall that started in the parking lot of the Visitors Center. After finishing this hike, we decided we wanted to just go back to our campsite and relax for the rest of the afternoon/evening!  It was so awesome. We started the campfire shortly before dark, and spent a really lovely evening hanging by the campfire. That night for dinner we had burritos - It's one of our favorite camping meals!  And it was especially easy this time, because we were able to cook up some rice and ground turkey at home and bring it with us in an ice chest, so all we had to do was assemble the burritos, wrap them in foil, and then cook them over the campfire! It's our favorite. SOOOOO toasty and delicious. And more s'mores for dessert, of course!! 

The next morning we woke up fairly early and packed up all of our stuff, and drove to Asheville, NC!  I'll do a separate post on all the fun we had in Asheville. We loved Great Smoky Mountain National Park, but honestly a lot of the people that were there were kinda bumming us out.  A LOT of people were littering... I have never seen so much litter in a National Park (especially cigarette butts... so many of them EVERYWHERE. Plus tons of plastic bottles, plastic bags, etc). And people were driving crazy and fast, and just weren't very friendly. It's a free National Park (most charge $20 or so to enter...), so we were wondering if that was part of the reason?  And we were also thinking it might have been because it was located RIGHT next to Gatlinburg, TN, and that place was a shit show. So, we're not exactly sure WHY, but the park totally had a different vibe than all of the other parks we've been to.

The next post will be all about Asheville, NC!!