Our journey has finally begun! We rolled out of the driveway around 7 on Tuesday morning and made camp in Great Smoky Mountains National Park about twelve hours later. The weather was pretty terrible until we came into Pigeon Forge. We picked up Skyline Drive in the middle, near its highest point, where the clouds clinging close to the mountains looked otherworldly. At lower elevations, though, the same dense patches of fog reduced our already slow drive to a white-knuckled crawl. The first 25 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway were more of the same, so we bailed onto the freeway and made incredible time to the Virginia/Tennessee line. One of our biggest concerns for the last week has been the weather. We tried our best to pack for every weather scenario, but the endless rain on the eastern seaboard had us a little bummed out. It looked for a while like basically every place we planned to go in the first two weeks was expecting yet more rain, but luckily for us they were totally wrong about eastern Tennessee and we made it in and out of the backcountry without a sprinkle. 
Wednesday we hiked from our back country campsite (two miles from the car) to Gregory Bald, about seven miles round trip. The top of the mountain is on the Tennessee/North Carolina border. Looking back toward Tennessee the view of Cade’s Cove is spectacular. The cove is named for a Cherokee leader, Chief Kade. It was settled by Europeans after the Revolutionary War and remained an active settlement until the park was formed in the 1920s. It’s one of the lowest-lying areas in the park, with big open meadows. We drove the Cade’s Cove scenic loop to get to our parking area, but in addition to the park’s huge herd of saddle horses and a coyote, we mostly just saw a lot of tourists driving very badly, including one couple who stopped dead in the middle of the one-lane road to stare at some white tailed deer for multiple minutes while traffic stacked up behind them. 

By contrast, the backcountry was relatively deserted. We shared our campsite with another small group Tuesday night but had it to ourselves on Wednesday. There isn’t any true back country camping in GSMNP (it’s the most-visited national park in the country), so permits and reservations are required and all sites are equipped with bear cables for rigging up packs, which is extremely convenient. We had no trouble with bears at all, but Victor spotted a cub on our hike out. We didn’t stick around to see mama. It was an easy two miles back out; the Smokys’ namesake fog in the towering rhododendron made the woods feel prehistoric. 
Today we headed to Asheville, NC after a visit to Clingmans Dome, the highest point in Tennessee. Our route will continue to take us site to Florida, and then west along I-10 to California before heading up to the Olympic peninsula. After Glacier national park our planned itinerary falls apart a little, but we’ll end up in Ohio and then back to Virginia in time for Victor to fly to Iceland!