Catching up

I am a little behind on posting, time has really started to fly by! We had a beautiful, relaxing, and fun trip to the Smokies for our third anniversary. We went to Dollywood, Eagle Rock, Townsend, and Cades Cove. We spent our first day in Cades Cove hiking to Abram's Falls. This was not an easy hike... and I was wearing my Chaco's instead of tennis shoes :(

It was well worth it to get to the end and see the waterfall and stick our feet in the cold water. Another day we waited until about 5PM to go to Cades Cove and ended up driving through this time twice. It was a little quieter at this time of night so we took our time and rode with the windows down. There was also a good bit more animal activity. We saw two separate cubs. One we saw in a field from a distance... he kept popping his head up like he was playing peek-a-boo with the crowd. The other we got quite close to. He was walking up through the trees when we spotted him so we pulled over and walked over to get a closer look. Did not capture any great pics of the bear.... I tried though.

The bear started to walk towards us and that is when me and Wes headed back to the car... I am sure that 'Momma bear' was not very far. Thank goodness we did not see her! ;)We also ate at some very very good places around town! Wes has all the food pictures on his phone....so I don't have access to them right now. Calhoun's was a great place to eat. We probably could have shared a meal it was so much food. Everything we put in our mouth was delicious... I felt like a cook on tv saying "Yum" after every bite. And of course there was the Pancake Pantry. There are only hundreds of pancake houses in Gatlinburg, but we heard the pantry was the best... and it was real good. Wes had banana pineapple pancakes and I definitely ordered the blueberry! Yum!

We stayed at the Highlands condominiums (above is our BEAUTIFUL view). Just up the mountain from Gatlinburg... we could see the Ober Gatlinburg from our balcony.