Cades Cove

So, I didn't have worlds of time last night to go through all of my pictures, but I did go through a few of the Cades Cove ones. If you've never been to Cades Cove, just imagine driving on a narrow mountain road, meandering back and forth, up and down, through tall evergreens, past steep cliff faces, beside bottomless gulches...and breaking through the forest into this random and stunningly beautiful valley. It's completely surrounded by the blue Smokies and it's mostly old farmland from the original Appalachian settlers. Not the ORIGINAL original settlers, but the ones from the 1800's or so...before it became a national park. It's so peaceful and quiet. Always one of my favorite places in the Smokies.

There are a lot of historical buildings in the cove. And loads of daffodils. It's an 11 mile drive around the valley, with lots of places to stop for pictures. We found one such place...a big, open field filled (ha, field filled...heterographs...thank you, 4th grade English) with daffodils and decided to try for a family photo shoot.

It didn't quite work the way we intended, so we had to bribe the rugrats with a canister of lipbalm, the digital camera, and the Flip camera (which Piper Lee assumed was a cell phone). We took the pictures with our phones, so they're kind of meh, but better than nothing, right.

Real vacation pictures soon!