Another sightseeing day. Today our meanderings took us from the Pride RV Park to Maggie Valley, where we turned towards Great Smoky Mountains National Park by using a section of the Blue Ridge Parkway. The Blue Ridge Parkway is a squiggly road in this part of NC but if you drive to the Park this way, you will arrive at Hwy 441, which crosses the park south to north, at the Oconaluftee Visitor Center. It is a very nice visitor center and they have good bathrooms which are nice at my advanced age. This place is where the truly spectacular part of the road begins. The first 15 miles or so run pretty steeply uphill to Newfound Gap (elevation 5043′), the pass folks must have used to get from NC to Tennessee.
There are a series of beautiful tunnels on the NC side, in addition to numerous waterfalls right next to the road. All the waterfalls are feeding the Oconaluftee River which borders the road. This is a truly spectacular, bucket-list type of highway. The good stuff continues once you cross into Tennessee, where you will encounter more tunnels and a section of road that actually does a 360 with you driving over the top of a tunnel and circling around to pass through it. The only thing that was a problem on this road was regularly pulling over to let faster cars pass as they missed most of the scenery.
Once we got back down to the lower portion of the Park, we took a road to a place called Cade’s Cove. It is about a 25 mile drive up through some of the most beautiful hardwood forest scenery that may exist in this country. The road crosses back and forth across rivers and creeks and runs adjacent to numerous waterfalls and dripping rock cliffs before arriving in Cade’s Cove. Interestingly, there is no body of water here and, therefore, no coves but they call it a cove anyway. There is an 11 mile driving loop where we spotted lots of birds, three black bears, three elk, old residents’ cabins, a grist mill powered by water that is still functioning, some old barns and a few churches, which all looked identical. The churches all had crummy foundations made from a couple of stacked flat rocks.
The drive back down the road from Cade’s Cove is just as good as going up there since you get a different view of everything. Another bucket list section of road.
Once we got back to the northern end of Hwy 441 on the Tennessee side of the park, we drove north to Gatlinburg, which is a big tourist town. They even have a Ripley’s Believe It or Not, the trademark establishment for many tourist traps. From there we drove east on two-lane blacktops until we hit a section of the Foothills Parkway where we were able to continue on to I-40 for the drive of some 45 miles back to the Maggie Valley turnoff and the Invader.