Greetings from Blue Ridge Parkway

This me with my daughter, Rachael. It is the summer between graduation from high school and leaving for college (on the other side of the country). We decided we need to take an Epic Trip together, just the two of us. We thought maybe Maine, but we’d been there with her GS Troop. I said let’s do the Blue Ridge Parkway and then the Great Smoky Mountains, I’d been there about 25 years before and wanted to share it with her, my best buddy. We were gone for 9 days, camped the whole way. When we stared it was so amazingly hot we could hardly stand it, but we still stopped at every little overlook that caught our fancy and took as many side trips as we could. We even took the HORRIBLE detour just so we could go to Mt. Mitchell!!! We stopped at a Monster Museum that turned out to be a Haunted Fun House. Got Fried Fruit Pies near the Fields of Dan. Stayed Linnville Falls and went looking for the Brown Mountain Lights (with some complete strangers). Once we got to the Smokies we met a couple while we were waiting use the rest room and ended up sharing a campsite with them for the night - it started to pour that night harder than any night of the trip and our tent DIED we woke up and our little dome tent was full of water. We got up and spent the next couple hours till daylight in the car. We decided even if it didn’t stop raining we were here to have fun so we got a garbage bag stuffed tent in it and stuffed it in the trunk and drove off to look for breakfast in Cherokee, then spent the day working our way from that side of the mountains to Gatlinburg. We drove up Clingman’s Dome and walked to the top (and found our Campsite buddies again). That night after a nice dinner in Gatlinburg, we drove to one of the campsites on the far north west side of the park, picked a secluded campsite, paid for it and slept in the car (not our first night in the car mind you). The next day we drove the 10 hrs home via the boring Interstate Highway. Our photo here is us at Grandfather Mountain, it was sooo cold up there we had to buy the only long sleeve items they had at the gift shop. We took tons of pics inside and outside of the part, but when she went to school she took the camera - she downloaded them to her then new laptop, which has not died :( and they were still in the camera but it also died. Good thing we have our memories :) I’m soooooo glad we took that trip together nothing else would have meant as much to either of us….

Sincerely,
Kim