In The Mood

Many of you know that we visited The Great Smoky National Park in Tennessee during the week of March 15th. It was a great all-around experience for the family.   It was the time for us to get away to spend some “quality” time all together in a quiet place. The girls came home from college for this trip. The only real activity planned was to hike the trails of the park together, keeping to ourselves in general.

We walked the pathways in three different parts of the park over a period of three days. The weather stayed good for all of these hikes, and it rained only on the day we were returning. The three hikes were in three different kinds of settings, with three somewhat different types of terrain encountered, and natural surroundings experienced.  All of the hikes were challenging, with an approximately 2300 foot climb straight up a mountainside to a waterfall called Ramsey Cascades capping our efforts on the last day. Awesome! Pictures of the hikes will appear online at Pbase more slowly, and I may even write more about our outdoor experiences on this blog site, but this posting is primarily about what I was able to see from the place that we stayed at for four nights in the town of Gatlinburg.

Here is an excerpt from the review I wrote for the benefit of the owners of the place we stayed at:

“This condo, located on top of a hill, and facing downtown Gatlinburg and the ridges of the Great Smoky Mountains in the distance, was a great find for us. It is a quiet location from which you can sit by the window, or lounge on the balcony, and meditate over nature and its different moods from the comfort of your home. You have an unobstructed view of an expansive scenery laid out in front of you. Imagine yourself sitting beside the window quietly reading a book. Having some interest in photography, I got some wonderful shots under wildly varying conditions – day and night, morning and evening, cloudy and sunny. Just a note that in order to enjoy this wonderful experience, you will have to drive up and down some winding mountain roads with plenty of hairpin bends and steep slopes. It will not bother you if you have a sense of adventure. It could be a little nerve-racking the first time, but you do get used to it. (Plenty of people live in these hills!)”

All I am going to do in this post is show you some of the pictures I took from the place that we stayed at. (Click through the pictures to view them in their full size.)  I will be posting more pictures at Pbase.