Tennessee vaca Part 3 (Biltmore, Dollywood & Clingman’s Dome)

The next day we got ourselves together for a road trip to North Carolina. Another state I’ve never visited! : ) It’s so pretty there!

But first of all..another photo off the balcony at the cabin. Gorgeous! Good morning, God! : )

We had a slight little unplanned detour as our GPS led us onto a GRAVEL road for about a mile and a half. It wasn’t very wide either. A little bit scary…but the weird thing...people lived down there! We passed houses and the mailman along the way. We were so glad to be back on paved road though!

And tunnels..we don’t have those here..you have to have mountains for that.

And fog…or smoke…since were were in the “smoky” mountains.

But then we arrived…

…at Biltmore Estate. Wow. There just aren’t words for this place. Huge. Opulent. Ok..how about gaudy and a little over the top? It was really hard for me to think of that palace as a house. But anyway..so pretty. And as you can see, the weather was perfect!

The gardens were stunning. Can you just imagine yourself going for a morning stroll when the dew is still on the ground? Sigh…

The next morning I noticed a thermometer on the balcony so I took a picture of it at about 8:15 in the morning….

…because according to my iPod, it was already 80 here at home. UGH.

We headed off to Dollywood first thing. This little church is inside the park and they hold church services every Sunday. I think that is so cool! : )

Saw an amazing birds of prey show. This was one of the smallest birds.

And this is one of the biggest.

Amazing! And we had front row seats…hello off season. : )  They would bring the birds down off the stage on one side and walk across the front isle right in front of us. Very cool. And also..all the birds  are non-releasable for various reasons.

We rode the train.

We had some apple pie…but not that pie..the slices from that pie were HUGE.

This is a replica of Dolly’s childhood home. It’s hard to fathom that kind of upbringing with 13 people in the house..especially the day after going to Biltmore and it was built for 3 people..and ‘guests’.

This was inside the park..I felt like it should have been at the front. Oh well. Very pretty.

We loved Dollywood..it was just a relaxing day. Oddly enough, this is a retiree destination for sure…there was a sign that said “stroller parking” and there was one stroller and TWO scooters. LOL Enjoyed seeing the museum type exhibits in the park and we also took in a few shows..birds of prey, a play about the mountains and a video about the mountains. Loved them all.

The next morning we awoke to bad weather. But isn’t that a pretty sight off another one of our balconies. My girl used to call the sun’s rays God’s light. I think she’s right.

We decided to go to Clingman’s Dome the last day. Even though we knew we weren’t going to be able to see a single thing.  Not sure if we’re persistent or just stupid. They don’t call them the smoky mountains for nothing.

This is from the walkway at the dome. When we looked down we could barely see the path below us..much less any scenery.

I thought I was going to die walking this thing. The air is thin and I was gasping for air. My peeps weren’t having any trouble though. We were a mess by the time we got to the top..wet and very tired.

There was a placard for each ‘view’. This is the one for the northern view.

And this was the northern view.

Hmmm..tell me again why we walked all the way to the top. I guess it was so we could say we did it. Ok, we did it. : ) I met a nice couple from our area on the way up, so we had some nice chats while we made our way.  We took pics of each other at the top to ‘prove’ we made it. But we might as well have been standing in front of a piece of white paper!

This is the balcony on our last morning. I grabbed the camera and took this pic and then put my camera in my backpack for the trip home. You can really see the ‘smoky’ that morning. So pretty though.  Sigh…

We had said to ourselves that we would try to leave around 7 am. I woke up crazy early…that’s another story for another post…so we got moving pretty early. By about 7:15 we were saying good-bye to our beautiful cabin in the woods.  We decided to go ahead and turn our clocks back since we would hit time change pretty fast after we got on the road. So it was like leaving at 6:15am. Sa-weet! We ended up only taking one day to drive home instead of two. We hit some storms and our a/c went out…which made the storms harder since we didn’t have a defroster..not fun driving.

We made some Cracker Barrel pit stops along the way, too.

Yummo. And we pulled in at home at about 9:15pm. We were so glad we didn’t have to get up and finish the drive the next day. We took the van that night to the dealer and it was ready by mid-morning and I finished all the laundry an unpacking by mid-afternoon. 

The End. We had a great time and loved every minute of it. : )