Great Smoky Mountains

For the second half of our trip, we drove up the Blue Ridge Parkway to the Great Smoky Mountains and Cherokee, NC.










So, we're on the Blue Ridge Parkway. We were so excited that I pulled off at every turnout to take pictures. Turns out we were too low for the color changes, so most of our pictures have a lot of green in them (the color changes start at the higher elevations and work their way downwards).





We finally found some great color at the higher elevations. The camera really doesn't do the colors justice.










We finally made it to the Great Smoky Mountains...although...we never saw any alleged "smoky" in those mountains...










About half the park is in Tennessee...we can add another notch on our belt of states visited. In this pic, Dar is tennesseing and is finally tenness-believing.










The little black blur at the back of this picture is one of two black bears we saw from the road. So, our poor pix are partially my fault b/c I couldn't manage to get my mighty Ford Taurus fully off the road and the ranger was yelling at me. It was partly Dar's fault because he had the big zoom lens on and it couldn't focus on a bear that close (at one point, after we turned around and came by the bear again, it was 15 feet away from our car). Trust me, it's a bear.


We have pics of our Cherokee adventures too, but that will have to wait for another post.