Great Smoky Mountain National Park | Must See & Do, Tips for Visiting, & More!

Hey everybody! Welcome to The Waldock Way. I'm Jessica. I'm Emily. And today's video is going to be about our adventures recently in the Great Smoky Mountains. So over the Thanksgiving holiday, we took about five or six days and we stayed in Tennessee. We actually stayed in the city of Townsend in a cabin. It was absolutely gorgeous. I shared a little bit in my stories on Instagram and Facebook and now we're going to take you on just a few of our favorite things to do in Tennessee. And then at the end, make sure you stay tuned because I have just a little mini haul that I did from some of the gift shops there. So before I show you some of our favorite things that we do in Tennessee, this was our fourth time in the mountains. We absolutely love the Smoky Mountains. I'm going to let Emily tell us a few things. So what was one thing you learned on our trip this time? I learned that making butter is real, real hard. What are you doing? Trying to make this into butter. Is it easy? No, it's hard. When it hits, it kind of sticks. That's right. At one of the visitor centers, I believe it is Oak and the Lefty, right? They have a farm museum, so you get to see kind of how they lived in that area in that time period. And so they had an area where she got to try to churn butter and she was like, this is really hard. And I love butter. This would stink. Am I right? All right. So what was your favorite thing about the whole trip? Goats on the roof. As you just heard, Emily's favorite part of our vacation is always Goats on the Roof, which is a mountain coaster that can go up to 30 miles an hour, but you have full control with the handlebar on how fast you want to go. It is a scenic tour through the mountains, and it also actually includes goats on the roof that you can feed. Mine and my husband's favorite part of the Smokies is always the auto tours. There are tons of amazing tours that you can take. Some of our favorites have been the Foothills Parkway, the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail, Newfound Gap Road, and of course, our top pick, Cades Cove. Cades Cove is an 11-mile scenic loop where you can stop at some of the historic buildings and sites that have been there since the beginning of the settlers. It also offers some amazing wildlife. We have seen bears, elk, deer, turkeys, just to name a few, and there are some hikes you can take as well at Cades Cove. The most recent one we've taken was Abrams Falls, which is a two-and-a-half-mile moderate hike to a beautiful waterfall. If you're looking for a little bit easier hike, Laurel Falls Trail is also to a beautiful waterfall and it is a paved hike, although not located in Cades Cove. While you're at the Smokies, make sure you stop at the Sugar Land Visitor Center because they have an animal museum and you can see all the animals that live in the Smokies. The Oak and the Lofty Visitor Center offers a farm museum and you can see how they lived in this time period, which is always a lot of fun. If you take Newfound Gap Road, you're going to come across the North Carolina-Tennessee State Line, which happens to be where Clingman's Dome is located. That is the highest point in the Smokies and it offers the most gorgeous views. All right, so I'm going to leave you with the little mini haul that we did while we were at the Great Smokies. The first thing we picked up was a game, of course. This is by Trivial Pursuit. It is National Park Trivia. It comes in this really cute case and has tons of really awesome trivia questions. We can't wait to play. We also picked up this wooden medallion. It's about the size of my hand. I'm not really sure what it was for, but we shortened it so that we can make it an ornament for our tree. I was super excited to find this book series. It's called The Adventures of Bubba Jones. He goes back in time. It reminds me from the summary of a Magic Treehouse type book, but he's going back in time to the National Parks and this one specifically was the Great Smoky Mountains. I think there's three or four in this series, so we're excited to start these. We also picked up the Who Pooped in the Park? If you have not seen this series, yes, it has a hilarious title. It's really awesome. It's scats and tracks for kids and they're specific to the different parks. There's probably, I think, 20 of them for the most popular parks. So it just goes through the parks, all the different animals and the different scats and tracks. It's really, really good. I also picked up this book, Whose Tracks Are Those?, because I liked the way it presented its forest animals and it gave you this beautiful image with the tracks and it told you all about the tracks. You're seeing it about the animal and then it says, Who am I? And the next page tells you that it is a squirrel. So I just liked the way that this one presented. And I also grabbed the National Parks coloring book. This is actually two sets, which is really cool. So it has two coloring sheets that are the same. So me and Emily could both get a coloring sheet. They were perforated pages and they're only on the front. So there's nothing on the back, which makes it perfect. It was almost like it was made for us. And then the last thing we picked up was actually on our first day there and it was the Smoky Starter Kit. It's $5. So if you go, I recommend it because it kind of gives you everything that you need. So it comes with the Laurel Falls guide and an auto touring guide, a Great Smoky Mountains map, a Great Smoky Mountains trail map, a day hikes guide. And then it comes with the three little booklets for the Cades Cove tour, which obviously you guys know is our favorite. Clingmans Dome, which was actually closed when we went through and Newfound Gap Road as well. I hope you guys enjoyed learning on location with us at the Smoky Mountains National Park. And don't forget that learning can happen anywhere.