With all the projects around home this summer, we didn't really get a chance to have a 'just-our-family' vacation and its been over a year since we've camped out so we decided to use our Fall Break to camp out and explore one of the nearest national parks to us. The Great Smoky Mountains are about 6-7 hours away to the north east in Tennessee and North Carolina. We tried to get reservations a week or so before, but apparently October is one of the busiest months for the park and all the sites were reserved on one of the nights we were looking for. So we decided to just leave super early Thursday morning and get to the first come first serve campsite around lunch time. We packed up our stuff mostly Wednesday and just had the perishables to finish up on Thursday. Chris had just gotten back from his check-up and scan in Nashville late Tuesday night so we really only had Wednesday to get ready.
We got off fairly close to on time, around 5:00am and pulled up around 2pm to the campground. There were a handful of sites left but none of them had the designated tent spot big enough for our new tent but we found a good one with a flat spot in between the parking spot and tent area big enough. We LOOOOOVED our new tent. I'm sad I didn't get a picture of it set up. We've been using a 4 man tent for our family for a while since our kids are small enough but this new one is a 9-10 person tent and is tall enough for Chris to not bed over right in the middle. While it feels roomy inside, it doesn't look very big from the outside and has a footprint of about 16 x 9. With the rain fly off, it really feels like you're in a screen room or something.
Right away the kids wanted to explore the river/creek just on the opposite side of the campground. They found a space to skip rocks and were very content while Chris and I set up camp. Alec and Charlie can skip rocks way way better than me. While we let Chris 'test out the tent' to take a nap (since he's had a lot of driving and late night/early mornings in the past 48 hours) I went down to watch the kids skip rocks. We saw a little water snake nearby ... which kind of scared us all but we just kept a close eye on the river back and continued to skip rocks.
We left to try and find a place to buy firewood so we could cook dinner and drove for almost an hour without finding much. Our campground, Abrams Creek, is on the very edge of the park but is super isolated from any towns or roads leading into the rest of the national park. Also we had no cell phone coverage so I couldn't look up on maps where stuff was. I thought I had downloaded a map of the park to my Kindle before we left, but I couldn't find it. Really frustrating. We did find a hiking trail called Lookout Point or something that we decided to do before heading back to the campground. It helped make the drive feel less pointless.
The view from the top was amazing! I was surprise how winded I was as we walked the 1/2 mile to the top. I guess I'm pretty pregnant and out of shape. The weather was pretty warm, but not uncomfortably so.
It was interesting to do as the sign at the top suggested and try to imagine what it looked like from this point hundreds of years ago when just the Native American's lived here.
We got back to camp just before dark and used the charcoal we brought to cook our dinners. I had made Macaroni and Cheese the day before and served it up in little loaf tins, covered it with foil and just warmed it over the coals. Then we had a salad mix and left over cantaloupe. It was a really yummy and simple dinner.
For dessert we did banana boats. Its hard to see it in Alec's hand's here, but we each put whatever toppings we wanted in a slit open banana and wrapped it back up in the peel and then foil and again warmed it up on the coals until the chocolate melted.
I always sleep terribly my first night camping and this trip was no exception. We slept with the rain fly off because we were worried about being too hot. But it got pretty chilly and with the humidity/dew it was quite cold. Freddy woke up in the middle of the night and needed to sleep in our bed with us for a while. Charlie was cold and the extra sleeping bag I brought to act as more cushioning for my pregnant body was needed to drape over the kids for warmth. Around 2:00am I woke up hoping it was morning. My shoulder just ached and ached all night (I had gotten the DTAP vaccine two weeks before and something went terribly wrong... like maybe the nurse put it straight into the bone or something because it literally felt like I broke my shoulder).
But there's just something about snuggling in sleeping bags (on a queen-sized cot/bed) staring into the forest above you that I just love. By the time it was light the kids came and got warm in Chris and my space while Chris started more coals for breakfast.
This was our only full day and we really wanted to explore inside the National Park, so we left our campsite right after breakfast to go explore and hopefully find firewood somewhere along the way. It took about 45 minutes to drive from our campground to the nearest entrance to the National Park. We looked up a shortish, family friendly hike to some waterfalls and did that first. The trail was beautiful, the fall colors just starting to peep out. The kids have some kind of adversion to walking on the trail and took every opportunity to run along or up or down any dirt or rock on either side of the trail. This frustrated Chris (and me) to no end and it was kinda hard to enjoy the hike.
We eventually made it to the water falls and enjoyed a behind-a-tree-potty-break (for the kids... I had had the foresite to go on the side of the road behind the car at the trailhead where there was a little more privacy). The lack of bathrooms was kinda hard for my 7 month pregnant bladder and I ended up going in the trees more than once, or twice, (or three or four times).
The boys REALLY wanted to follow lots of people and go down a make shift trail to the lower falls. Chris HATES going off-the-official-trail, but consented and took the boys down while I stayed up top with Gwen and Freddy. I let them take off their shoes and wade a bit, but with a 40 foot drop to the next falls pretty close, I made them stay in a specific area and when Gwen slipped and fell in the water on the slippery rocks, I felt validated with my cautious rules. I was afraid she'd throw a fit about being all wet, but she handled it pretty well and laughed it off.
With more we wanted to see we headed back down the trail and tried once again to not let the whiny, disobedient, sassy tantrum throwing kids to kill the peace and beauty of the trail. I didn't really succeed and before we were 1/2 way down I had to take a rest and cry a little. My shoulder hurt, my kids were acting up and I was hot and tired. Why in the world did we do this?!
We drove to another park entrance, visited the restrooms and gift shop and had a picnic lunch. Then we tried to predict how long it would take to visit two more places in the park and still get back in time to make dinner over the fire. We figured we had enough time and drove about 45 min to the center of the park and drove up to almost the top of the 3rd highest mountain East of the Mississippi river: Clingman's Dome. The short .5 mile trailhead to the top was closed but thats probably for the better since we were all tired. We let the kids climb on some big boulders, shopped at the small gift shop and took some pictures of the incredible view.
Then we headed back towards our campsite, the long way via touring Cades Cove - the biggest valley of the National Park with the biggest meadows... the best spot to view wild life and see some of the early settler cabins. It was interesting to read about the people who lived in this valley before it became a national park. The 11 mile loop around Cades Cove is one way with a fairly slow speed limit. Also, with it being near dusk, prime time to see wildlife, and it being the busiest month of the year for the park, there were quite a few cars on the road. People driving trucks with people sitting in camping chairs in the back looking around. The weather was perfect. We were driving slow enough we let the kids get unbuckled and hang out the windows/sunroof to get good looks. We didn't stop at any of the cabins because we were worried about getting back too late to eat dinner. We saw horses (not wild) and were hoping to see deer or a black bear.
At one point, we had the decision to turn right, exit the loop and head home early but we hadn't seen anything yet so we decided to continue on the loop and just take the next shortcut through the loop to go back to that exit. I thought it would add 20 minutes or so, but the people were driving SO SLOW in front of us it ended up being more like 40 min. Then right before our shortcut turn all the cars stopped infront of us. We knew it probably meant something exciting like an animal sighting but no one was following the rules to pull off the road that we just sat there, just out of sight of what they were looking at. Kinda frustrating. Then finally the cars pulled slowly ahead and we were able to see a glimpse of the black bear they were all looking at as it wandered away from us about 200 yards away. You can KIND OF see the black dot along the edge of the grass on the left-hand side of this photo:
We sped down the shortcut road and turned back on the loop just a mile from our exit point and surprisingly there was no other cars on the road now. Just as we rounded a turn, we saw this HUGE black bear cross the road not more than 30 feet from our car. We pulled over and watched it walk quickly into the forest and when we took our exit down this dirt road a minute later, we saw the bear again. This time it stopped and looked straight at us for a while. Super cool.
Our one-way dirt road exit (which seemed like a totally legit road on the map and would've been a shortcut from having to drive all the way back to one of the main entrances of the park) turned out to be a little scary. It was more like an extra wide hiking trail than a road and we had to go so slow on all the switch backs and turns as it moved across, up and over the mountains. Chris joked that we went on a Cr-ike (a car hike). It took a while to navigate and by the time we got out of the park it was 7:00 pm and pretty much sunset - we still had a 45 min drive back to our campsite. We decided to forgo the hot dog / chili cheese fries over the fire dinner and grab something at a Subway on our way back. It was a good choice. When we got to our campsite we were able to just make a fire to roast marshmallows on and listen to Chris read our family book. (at that time we were near the beginning of The Hobbit). All the kids just sat quietly in their chairs listening to Chris for almost an hour. It was the first moment that turned out how I had happily anticipated: sitting peacefully around the campfire. The campsite had filled up during the day and we had neighbors to one side. This little boy kept sneaking over to our fire to listen to Chris.
The second night was much better than the first for a couple of reasons. 1 - we put the rain fly on and were dry-er and warmer. 2 - we were all so exhausted we all slept deeper. Still by dawn, my shoulder was aching and I and a few kids had to go to the bathroom so I got up early and started the fire for breakfast. Since we didn't get to make our dutch oven peach cobbler for dessert the night before, we had it for breakfast. It was my first time doing a dutch oven thing totally on my own including the fire. To make it seem more breakfast-y I put on the left over berries on top. It was delicious!
We basically had to clean up and go home since we still had a 7 hour drive and wanted to have the car unpacked and the house a bit settled before Sunday, knowing that come Monday morning regular life started again. The kids helped burn the garbage and skipped more rocks while Chris and I packed up.
Looking back, it was a good memory and I'm glad we made the necessary sacrifices so the kids could grow up with an appreciation for God's beautiful earth and camping. But man oh man, camping is A LOT OF WORK.
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