Have you ever been to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park? If you’ve visited any of the national parks, this is likeliest since it is the most visited of all. The park straddles North Carolina and Tennessee with an easy detour off the expressways cutting through it. You can cheat on your way from a northern state down to Georgia or Florida and go just a bit out of your way to drive through the park.
Better, of course, is to take some time and enjoy the scenery from walking through it rather than through the car window. I must confess, I was a drive-by viewer a few years ago in late February en route from Michigan to Atlanta.
Was I ever lucky!
A storm had coated everything with a thin layer of sparkling ice and I saw all the trees decorated in a glorious way. It made the roads kinda scary when you were at the higher elevations. The authorities ended up closing the park road and were waiting at the exit with barriers when I left at dark. I was one of the last people out.
In the meantime, I did stop and shoot photographs of the trees sparkling in the sunshine and then just as the sun was setting.
Here’s a panoramic Christmas card created from a series of the last shots of the evening:
A Zazzle colleague, Tennessee Backroads, posted this Smoky Mountain Bear Cub t-shirt today on another site and it caught my attention right away, it’s so well done! Plus, it made me think of the Smoky Mountains. I’d love to go back and spend a few days there!
During late spring or autumn maybe.
A few more Smoky Mountain gifts that I liked. . . you can check out all the gifts at Zazzle.com featuring the Smoky Mountain National Park.
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