Our first full day in Gatlinburg, we went to the Smokey Mountain National Park for a hiking trip. I'd researched kid-friendly hikes before we left, but what I ended up choosing wasn't easy to find. However, we did end up stumbling upon a pretty good hike.
Check out the deer in the background (right behind the tree). We were shocked when he came up so close to us. We were quiet, watched him for a while, and he watched us for a while. Then he moseyed off, and so did we. The deer and a creepy black snake (which I high-tailed it from too fast to take a picture, and frankly who wants a picture of a big creepy snake??) were the only wildlife we saw, but that was fine by me.
The hike we ended up on was gorgeous. The best we could tell from the map, we hiked about 4-5 miles that day. We were shooting for a waterfall at the top of the trail, but we didn't make it all the way up.
Elise was a rockstar. She was our leader most of the time, setting the pace (which was a pretty fast one!). She loved finally getting to try out her new hiking boots. She never whined, never asked to be carried, and while she did get sweaty and red-faced, she had a blast.
Erin, on the other hand, was not so keen on hiking. I'd guess she walked on her own about 1/3 of the time. The other 2/3 of the time, her Daddy and I took turns hauling her. And might I add that she didn't want to ride piggy back, which is the easiest for me. Oh no. She wanted to be carried on a hip. Needless to say, I was exhausted, and Sean ended up carrying her the majority of the time.
Almost the entire trail was near water, so that was neat. When we finished hiking, we went down to the water, and the girls put on their water shoes (I had wisely packed them, hoping we'd get a chance to wade in somewhere) and I went out in the water with them. It was refreshing after a long hike!
For some reason, the pictures loaded in reverse order. This is literally less than 5 minutes after we started off. Notice who is already being carried. We might've done better if we'd noticed earlier that we could drive this road to the trail head. We had parked farther back, then Sean figured out on the map (that we bought where we parked) that we could drive up further--it was narrow, and hard to get two cars passing each other on the road, but it was fine. He went back for the car and picked us up, and we drove over there. If we wouldn't have already walked this road before hiking, I like to tell myself we could've made it to the top.
The girls with our map, ready for an adventure!
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