Vacation in the Smokies

I know things have been a little quiet on the blog front lately. Part of it is because I'm busy, part of it is because we were on vacation last week. We rented a cabin in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, which bills itself as the gateway to the Smoky Mountains National Park.

I haven't been to this area since my family went on vacation more years ago than I care to remember. I tend to overplan vacations, and this year I promised my wife we would stay in one place more than a day or two. Renting a cabin worked out for both of us, we weren't driving several hours a day trying to get to the next place, but I had plenty of things I could photograph.

I spent several evenings in the park, trying several spots to get sunset photos. The best place I found was the Morton Overlook, where the above photo was taken. I also tried one morning to get sunrise photos, but I never found a good spot for them. I also didn't really care driving up dark mountain roads at 4:30 in the morning.




We did spend a morning driving around the Cades Cove area, where we saw this family of bears out in a field at noon. We also saw several deer grazing or sitting at the side of the road, where cars where streaming by 10 feet away. In one case, we saw a grazing deer and a lady got out of her car and walked up to the deer to take its picture. It completely ignored her.


Unfortunately it rained the latter half of the week. Not too bad at first, but at times pouring down bad enough that I didn't feel comfortable driving the car. We spent part of Thursday in town at the Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies. Being a big aquarium geek, it was the only attraction we really did.

Gatlinburg itself is a typical tourist town, eager to seperate the tourist from their money. Outside of town, there is a area called the "Arts and Craft" trail. A several mile section of road full of galleries and studios. We spent more time in this area than we did in town. I only saw one photographer set up though which somewhat suprised me.

All in all, we had a good time and both of us were reluctant to leave. I have a long list of things I never got around to photographing, and we really enjoyed the cabin. We will be back.

I got enough good photos, that I may do a second SoFoBoMo book out of them. I'm still working on laying out the first one though, so we will see how it goes.