Great Smokey Mountains National Park

 I got kind of lazy during the trip and stopped posting every couple of days. We're home in Michigan now for a month long break before we continue. Our next stop after Congaree was the Smokey Mountains. We've been there several times so this trip we just drove through the park and enjoyed the view but didn't do any hiking.

 

The park lived up to its name, the mountains were covered in clouds most of the day. This was near the highest point, Newfound Gap overlook.

Add another state to the list for this trip. We tried to get photos every time we entered a new state but missed quite a few of them. Some of the welcome signs just popped up out of nowhere while we were driving.

I've driven through the park many times but never drove the Cades Cove loop road so we did that this time. I didn't realize it was a single lane, one-way road. The scenery was beautiful but a lot of it turned into a 15 mph bumper to bumper traffic jam. This was near the start of the loop.

We did see some deer but getting any good photos was tough because there was almost nowhere to pull over to stop and it was a steady stream of cars behind you.

 

The highlight of the loop road was seeing a some bears, a mother and 3 cubs.

They were playing in a field of knee high grass so I couldn't get any really good photos. Plus there was nowhere to pull over and as soon as people stopped a ranger ran up and started yelling at everyone to keep moving.

A turkey we saw at a spot where nobody was right behind us so I was able to stop and snap a few photos.