A Long and Fun Day Trip

 

Blairsville, Ga  (high 78 low 55)

We had a nice cold front move in last week-end, which gave us low temps down to 43 degrees, with upper 60’s for the highs for a few days. It felt wonderful.  Cool days, sunny blue skies and no humidity.  It’s warmed up now but still very, very nice and much better than Tampa.

Al has been doing better, but is still having some sporadic itching and hives.  We can’t figure out the problem, but at least it is more bearable .

My laptop suddenly slowed down and was nearly unusable, but after I messed with it a few days, I decided to take it to a professional for some tweaking. It’s back to normal now, so maybe I can get caught up on blogging and blog reading.

Since I’m so far behind on my blogging, I’ll just tell you what we did yesterday, and try to get caught up later.

We have always loved Cades Cove, which is a beautiful valley or cove in the Tennessee section of the Great Smokey Mountain National Park.   It was first settled by the Cherokee Indians but in 1818 the first European settlers arrived there.  Life was hard back then, judging by the many young people buried in the cemeteries.

We made a day trip to Cades Cove on Wednesday with our main goal to see a bear.  With the exception of last year, we’ve always seen a lot of wildlife when we visited.

Cades Cove loop is an 11 mile one way scenic road around the cove.  There are beautiful meadows, streams, old homesteads, churches and cemeteries.  The 11 mile loop can be driven walked, or biked.

It’s a 143 mile drive from Blairsville, through mountains. It takes quite a while to get there, so our time is pretty limited.  Our goal was to see wildlife so we didn’t have the time to spend looking through the old homesteads, churches or cemeteries.

We left home when it was just as the sun was rising. We were treated to a beautiful red sky over the RV park.

 

We stopped at a few scenic overlooks on the way.

 

The most direct route to Cades Cove from here it straight up hwy 129 and over “The Tail of the Dragon”, which is a famous motorcycle trail.  It’s only an 11 mile road, but it has 318 curves in those 11 miles and it’s slow going and not really any fun because you can’t take your eyes off the road for one second.

It’s 114 miles taking the Dragon and 143 driving regular mountain roads.  Neither way is a good option for a one day trip.  We opted for the longer route avoiding the Dragon. We went hwy 64, to 294, to 68, 411, 72, to 129 then to the Foothills Parkway.

As we got close to the Dragon, we started seeing more and more motorcycles, and an accident.

We got to an intersection near the Dragon.  If we took the wrong turn, we would have been on the Dragon with no way to turn around.  We stopped to ask directions and verified we were going the right direction.

We finally got to Cades Cove, and as always were amazed at the beauty.  The pictures really don’t capture how magnificent it really is.

The blooming goldenrod gave some nice color.

Two large tom turkeys were strutting their stuff and were our first wildlife sighting of the day.

 

Soon, we heard that someone spotted a bear up in a tree so we hurried over to see what we could see.  When there is a wild life sighting, everybody stops and jumps out of their cars to try to get pictures.

We got to the “traffic jam” so we knew we were in the right spot. The bear was hiding in the tree and so far up it was very hard to spot him.  Someone had to point it out to you before you could find the very large bear.   Al guessed he was 75-100 feet up in tree  on some small branches.  I didn’t know they went so high up.

.

He was eating something, I believed to be acorns, but it may have been some tender new leaves.  I did see acorns when I zoomed in.

Unfortunately, there were some nice thick leafy tree branches in front of his face, so it was difficult to get a good picture.  At least we saw a bear and got some pictures! We were happy.  We stayed a long time, hoping he would move to a better location, but he never did.

This was about the best shot I could get.

 

Most pictures looked like this.   Darn bear.  :)

You can tell from this picture that he was a big bear.

He finally moved a little but still kept covered enough so that I couldn’t get his picture. 

We finally gave up and went back to our loop road. These are technically called the Smokey Mountains, but they sure look like the  Blue Ridge mountains to  me.  :)

It wasn’t long until Al spotted something.

Our first coyote!

 

It’s just an incredibly beautiful day with highs maybe 70 degrees.  NO internet, so we never knew for sure.

 

Our next wild life sighting was a small copperhead snake. We wondered if he may have been hit by a car, but maybe he was just warming up on the roadway.   I tried to scare him out of the road, but didn’t want to get out of the car to move him.  He was over to the side of the road, so hopefully he survived the day.

We got out and walked down into a lovely meadow.

The mowers left patches of goldenrod. 

 

 

 

 

A peak of fall  color.

 

 

 

We took a little time to visit a couple of old homesteads.  Doesn’t this guy remind you of Popeye?

 

How about that view?

 

 

Several times we heard that a bear had recently been spotted, but the time we got there they had moved on.  One had three cubs with her.  Hated to miss that.

Finally, we were rewarded for our patience and spotted a mama bear and one cub.  They were a pretty good distance away, but with the magic of my “stalker” zoom lens, I was able to get a few decent shots.  Unfortunately, the sun was in the wrong place.   But at least we got something.

Mama bear looks a little thin. I hope she will make it through the winter. 

 

We had been on or way out when we spotted these bears, so we ended up getting a late start for home.

After the bears, we saw this beauty.  He was very used to people.

He stopped and posed for pictures.

It was a great day, but then the fun began as we began a looong drive home over mountain roads that would surely end in the dark!  (We never drive in the dark)

We did have to stop for to see “Look Rock” on the way home.

It was a very long day and much too long for a day trip, but we had success.  We saw some bear and many other things as well.