Our Smokey Mountains Vacation - Day Three, Part One: Cades Cove Loop Road

This post is part of a travel series of our vacation in the Smokey Mountains.  To start at the beginning, go HERE!  The rest of the post in chronological order are HERE!

After a very rigorous hike to Rainbow Falls the day before,  our aching bodies were ready for a more relaxing day so my husband and I decided to drive the Cades Cove Loop Road.

When I was planning our trip to the Smokies, the Cades Cove Loop Road constantly came up in my Pinterest feed.  It is one of the most popular scenic roads in the park.  When I looked at other people's pictures, I will be honest, I was not impressed.  I couldn't understand why this road was so popular.  Nevertheless, I had to see it for myself to find out why this place was so well-loved, and once I did, I understood why!  Driving the Cades Cove Loop Road was one of the biggest highlights of my time in the Smokies!  The landscape was so serene and peaceful.  The prairie land looked so beautiful with the scenic mountain back drop.

When preparing for our trip I read a lot of blogs where they talked about how busy this road was and how you could be stuck in traffic for hours, but that was not our experience.  We arrived at the entrance to the loop before the gate was open and waited in line.  We had to ride in a caravan of cars for a little while, but once we pulled over to the first stop all the cars went past us and we pretty much had the place to ourselves.  

It takes over an hour just to get from Gatlinburg to Cades Cove, but the road just to get to the gate was part of the adventure.  We drove through tunnels, saw rivers and waterfalls, and a turkey!

Cades Cove is an 11 mile, one way loop.  Allow two to four hours to tour Cades Cove, longer if you plan on doing any of the trails.

There are many, many stops along Cades Cove Road.  There are hiking trails (we didn't take any this day as we were spent from yesterday's hike), churches, scenic views, and many homesteads.  So many people just drive the loop and never stop, but I think we stopped at almost all of them.  We especially loved the churches.  

There is supposed to be a guide that you can buy for $1.00 at the start of the loop, but all the boxes were empty when we were there.  The guide apparently tells you the history of all the stops along the road.

There are three churches in Cades Cove.  We missed the first church but thankfully caught the next two.

This church had a cemetery right outside its windows.  It seems kind of eerie to have a cemetery so close to a church (although I know that was common back in the day) but I can't help to wonder as people sat in church and saw the gravestones right out the church window if perhaps they paid better attention to the sermons 😀

Cades Cove is so rich in history.  If you're a history buff, you will love Cades Cove. Cherokee Indians hunted this land for hundreds of years.  The first European settlers arrived in 1818.

Here are pictures of the insides of two of the churches we stopped at.  They are very plain and simple.

Deer, black bears, coyotes, and turkeys are frequently spotted in Cades Cove.  When we were there we saw deer, a coyote, and lots of turkeys, and one bear so far in the distance I couldn't even make him out.

I could not get over the beauty of the landscape. Pictures do not do it justice.  No wonder I was unimpressed with the photos I saw on Pinterest.

We finally spotted some deer!

About half way through the loop you come to the Cades Cove Visitor Center.  Here are restrooms and a small gift shop.  On the grounds is the Cable Mills Historic Area.

There is a beautiful old farm along a river on the grounds.

Cable Mill

I was so happy that we were able to go inside all these old farmhouses and cabins.  It was so interesting to see how the settlers lived back then.

Every barn we saw in the park had this same shape.  They are very different from Wisconsin barns!

Can you see the turkey walking in the field below?

After our tour of the Cable Mills Historic Area it was back in the car again, but we stopped many more times to tour all the log cabins and farms along the road.

I think I fell in love with every cabin and said to my husband "I'll live here".  I imagined myself sitting on the front porch every morning with a coffee and Bible in hand looking at this gorgeous Mountain View.

This is the backyard of the house whose front porch I was standing on.

Then I arrived at the next cabin and I wanted to live there!  I loved how this one was nestled up against the woods.

Another funky looking barn.  How do those overhangs not collapse?

This cabin looked so similar to the one above that I had to recheck the pictures to make sure it wasn't the same one.  Just like the suburbs today where all the houses seem to look alike, so did the cabins of Cades Cove!  😀.  Each one though had a very unique property, it was so hard to decide which one I would rather live on.  They were all so beautiful in their own way.

This is one of my favorite pictures of Cades Cove.  I feel it really symbolizes the history and the serene beauty of the area.

Oh, I loved Cades Cove.  It was such a beautiful, relaxing morning.  But our day wasn't over yet, we were up so early that we had plenty of time to explore more!  So come back next week for Part Two!

Finally, here are two very short videos to give you a sense of the peaceful beauty of Cades Cove.

Have a Great Day! Amy

Linking Up with these Fabulous Blogs HERE!

 

The Graduation Card That Never Made It

Have you ever sent a gift to someone and had no idea if they ever received it?  It seems to happen to me a lot,  and it's really getting annoying.  One reason is Thank You cards have appeared to go out-of-style.  I RARELY receive a Thank You card for gifts anymore.  In my day, it was quite the faux pas if you did not send Thank You cards.  I guess that shows my age.  Not sending Thank You cards shows a lack of gratitude or appreciation.  But what really bothers me, is I have no idea if the person even received my gift when they don't send a Thank You card other than checking my checkbook balance.  But if I buy them a gift, then I cannot even do that.

And such is the story of this card.  We received a graduation announcement at a very odd time of the year, it was not spring, so we thought either the graduate was behind on sending out their announcements, or he graduated in the winter.  Nevertheless, I made a handmade card and sent a check, and you guessed it, nada.  Now here's the really interesting part of the story, the check was never cashed.  And it's been a long time, almost a year now.  At first we thought, "Well, maybe the boy is away at college and the card was sent to his home and he hasn't received it yet, but when he goes home on break, he will cash it".  Well, months went by and that didn't happen.  So then we thought "Well maybe his mail sat for so long it got buried under all the junk in his room," or "Maybe the card got lost in the mail".  By now, so many months have passed we feel stupid to call and ask "Did you ever get our card?"  But then I also feel bad if the recipient thinks I never sent him anything for his graduation.  And worse, if the card did get lost in the mail, the last thing I want to do right now is make a whole new card and write another check.  Checks are expensive and I do not have the time to make another card.  I know. I'm lazy, and probably wrong.  I feel guilty.  I should probably just contact the mother via FB and ask her if her son ever got the card.  But now I feel so much time went by it would just be awkward.  What would you do?

Anyway, here is the long forgotten, never received, lost card:

The recipient is a boy, so I created a card using dark colors and masculine images.  I used designer paper for the background, then stamped the sentiment and image onto card stock and cut them out using my Spellbinder's Nestabilities.  Brads were used to hold the sentiment in place.

Edited to add an update:  Since everyone advised me to contact the mother even though it's been such a long time, I finally did.  She said "If I never received a Thank You card then her son never got the card, but she will check his room" 😀". This family was always so good about sending Thank You cards in the past, so I'm 100% certain the card got lost in the mail.  

 Have A Great Day!  Amy

May Blooms

Ah, May!  My favorite month of the year!  I love seeing all the flowers emerge out of the ground and bloom.  I love the gorgeous blossoms of the crab apple trees.  It's so wonderful to see life begin again after a long, cold, dark winter.  But as much as I love the month of May,  it is a busy month for me.  There is so much to do, I often feel overwhelmed. The garden beds have to be cleaned up and weeded.  Fresh mulch needs to be applied in the gardens that need it most.  Seedlings need to be started indoors.  Baby annuals need to be planted.  The vegetable garden needs to be planted.  Porches need to be cleaned, and some repainted.   Indoor plants need to be taken outside for the summer.   I wake up each morning stressed out and think:  "What is the most important thing I need to accomplish today?"  But little by little, things get scratched off my list, and by June I can relax a little and just spend the rest of the summer watering and weeding...until Fall, when the busy, hard work begins again.

But let's not think about all the hard work see what is in bloom in my garden in May, shall we?

The creeping phlox is always one of my favorites to behold.  I love how it's "creeping" onto my stairs.

 The daffodils and tulips really outdid themselves this year.  

Grape Hyacinths with some Catmint.

These red tulips were so striking this year.  Brighter and bolder then I remember from previous years.

Thank goodness there was no late frost or blizzards this year to ruin our Crabapple blooms.  Last year we didn't get any blooms because of the weather.

This Crabapple tree was the star of the garden this year.  Of course it helps to have a beautiful carpet of Creeping Phlox behind it.

I try to keep this bed as free of perennials as possible because it is right in front of the house, so I want to have lots of room in it to plant annuals.  I have pulled this Laminin (the purple flower) out so many times, yet it is so vigorous, it keeps growing back.  It certainly is pretty though, isn't it?

I love the color of this orange tulip.

Here the Laminin is growing so vigorously it's taken over a huge part of the garden.  But I don't mind it's vigor in this garden.  This garden is very far from house and I like to spend as little time in this garden as possible.  I can't even see this garden from my house, so I don't care about it as much.  I grow naturalized plants in here;  like orange day lilies, so that it is very low maintenance.

I was so happy to see so many daffodils this year.  I felt the blooms were diminishing and they needed to be dug up and divided...which would be a lot of work!  For whatever reason, they seemed to have re-energized themselves. 

I've always loved the rose-like blooms on this shrub.  I only wish there were more of them and they lasted longer.

An early-blooming Vibernum bush.

I hope you enjoyed my little May garden tour.  I will be back in June with more pictures!  Something new blooms every month!

Have A Great Day!  Amy

Linking up with these Fabulous Blogs HERE!