Smoky Mountain get-away

 We're back from our short vacation, so prepare yourselves for lots of pictures as I share what we did!
Our son and DIL live in KY, so we decided to take a short vacation to the Smoky Mountains and spend some time with them there.

It takes about 10 hours to drive from our home to the cabin we had rented near Pigeon Forge.  We decided to leave on Thursday and drive part way so it wouldn't be such a long day. That day went fine. Friday was not so fun though.  We ran into lots of construction, very busy roads and then torrential downpours while driving through the mountains.  As we got close to the cabin it stopped raining.

Here you can see the clouds hanging over the mountains.  This is the valley right before we drove up to our cabin.

It was quite a drive to the cabin, steep hills and switchback turns which were pretty scary.  Then we got to our driveway and wondered if we could go up it - it was so steep along with a turn back.  After we'd been there, we found out if we went a ways down the road, we could turn around and then enter a little straighter which made it easier.

Here's a picture of the driveway from the house.  You can see how steep it was and what a turn it was as we were coming from the right.

Once we got there, the cabin was beautiful!

This is the view we had from the deck.

The rain drops were still hanging on the leaves.

This was the living area, the dining area is to the right, and the kitchen was there too.  It was a very nice place to stay in.
Andy and Nikki arrived about an hour after we got there, and we settled in for the evening.

On Saturday morning, Andy and Nikki went for a little hike, and Bob and I took a little drive.  We loved seeing the beautiful scenery!

Along with the beautiful spots are the tourist spots!

This little stream ran near our cabin.  It was such a pretty spot.  I was down near the rocks taking pictures and there was a little bat sleeping that I took a picture of.  I was so upset later, when I tried to upload the picture and found I had a bad SD card and all the pics I took were gone, including the ones of the bat.

That afternoon, Andy and Nikki to us to Skyland Ranch to check it out and then to go to a dinner show there.

I'm not a fan of heights, so wasn't thrilled with this part.  We had to take the sky tram to get up to the ranch.  Nikki and I were in one tram, that's Bob and Andy in the tram ahead of us.  I was glad to get back on solid ground!

Bob and I at the ranch.  Excuse my squint - the sun was so bright!

There were lots of animals to see, including some cute highland cows.

Bob and Nikki posing for us.

After this we went to our dinner show called the Chuck Wagon Express where we had a really good BBQ dinner.

The show had music, whip cracking, rope tricks and lots of humor.  Andy even got called up to help in an Old McDonald Skit.

We ended the day with this gorgeous sunset over the mountains.