A Great Smoky Mountain Thanksgiving

Last week, I headed back out east for Thanksgiving break.  I flew into Detroit and spent my first night there hanging out with Steve, Melissa, Sean, and Kirsten.  We had some great time eating dinner then at Ashley's.  It was great to see friends again, even though it was such a short visit.

Then on Monday, Arika and Sheldon picked me up in Ann Arbor and we headed down to Tennessee where my parents rented a cottage in the Great Smoky Mountains.  On our way down, we stopped at the William Howard Taft National Historic Site in Cincinnati, which wasn't quite as cool as the Garfield site Arika and I had stopped at back in August, but it was still good.

Before he was president, he spent some time out of the country.  Here is his key to Manila.

We drove by the new "touchdown Jesus" statue.  They completely redesigned the new one after the old one burnt down after getting struck by lightning.  The new one isn't anywhere near as comical as the old one.

We got to the cottage late, so we just hung out the first night.  When we woke up the first day, it was so foggy and rainy that we couldn't see the mountains!  We took most of the day to head into town to get some rain gear for Arika.  We got back in time to go for a very short rainy hike.  We just followed a creek as far up a mountain before we figured we would run out of daylight.

Here is my bed in the cabin.  It was king sized and very comfortable.

Here is our view from the cabin on Thanksgiving after the fog, rain, and snow finally lifted.

On Wednesday, it was still very foggy, but today it was snowing, so we headed out to the National Park to go for a hike and see some wildlife.  We headed up Abrams Creek Trail, which, as the name implies, follows Abrams Creek.  The goal of the hike was the Abrams Falls (pictured at the top).  It was a very fun hike, especially since we took a detour off of the trail and got to the peak of a local maximum in order to find some better views.  Luckily, while we were up higher, the fog lifted enough that we could see farther than we had been able to so far on the trip.  

Arika spotted a sow and her 3 cubs climbing a tree while we were driving through the park.

This is part of Cade's Cove.  It is supposed to be a great place to see wildlife.  All we saw were a bunch of whitetails (which a bunch of other tourists couldn't help but get out of their car and take pictures of).

Arika and me along Abrams creek on part of our Wednesday hike.

Here is the nice view we found once we went of trail and gained some elevation (the trail followed the creek the whole way, so it stayed in the valley).

Another great view afforded by our higher vantage point.

Arika and Sheldon up in the mountains.

Then of course we had a fantastic Thanksgiving dinner, with participation from multiple families to add great variety.  Thursday night, everybody went up into the park with the goal of climbing to the high point of Tennessee, but the road to the trail was closed, so we just hung out for a little bit at an overlook along the Appalachian Trail.

Friday, Arika, Sheldon, and I headed back up to Michigan and we had dinner in Ann Arbor before they dropped me off at a friend's house.  And then I flew back to Washington Saturday morning.  It was a great trip and I had a great time seeing friends and family again.