After a beautiful morning in downtown Asheville, we began the quick hour and forty-minute drive over to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, our home for the next 3 nights as we explored the beautiful Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The drive through North Carolina and Tennessee was beautiful. Thankfully I was ahead of Todd on this drive because I was able to warn him that the camper would not be able to make it on some of the curvy roads. He had to…
After completing our morning hike around Abbott Lake at Peaks of Otter lodge on the Blue Ridge Parkway, we began our drive south to Asheville, North Carolina. The Blue Ridge Parkway actually continues into North Carolina and just passes to the east of Asheville. While that would’ve made for an incredible drive, we decided that we needed to save that drive for another trip where we had more time just to explore that area. We would hate to rush the…
While living in Washington, DC, I got a lot of recommendations to visit Natural Bridge, Virginia. Natural Bridge is just a short 3 hour and 15-minute drive from the city. I didn’t know much about the area, honestly. But, once I read a little about Natural Bridge, I added it to our DC bucket list. Unfortunately, our weekends during the short time we lived in the area quickly filled up. So, when we began planning this road trip I figured this was…
The Blue Ridge Parkway is an iconic roadway through the Appalachian Highlands with 469 miles of winding roadways and stunning vistas. The Blue Ridge Parkway is the Utah Route 12 of the East Coast. We drove Utah Route 12 last year through breath-taking Utah scenery on our cross-country road trip. This year we decided to drive a portion of the East Coast equivalent, the Blue Ridge Parkway. This drive connects Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to Great Smoky Mountains National…
The first stop of our 2nd road trip was a place we visited often during our stay in Washington, DC. Charlottesville is definitely picturesque Virginia countryside at its finest! The beautiful rolling hills of the Appalachian Mountains are lined with vineyards and farms. Charlottesville is home to the University of Virginia, founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, and also lies at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Shenandoah National Park is only a short distance away, and the town…
As we began to prepare for our second cross-country road trip in 9 months, I had to prepare mentally more than anything else. Although I was really excited to embark on another adventure across the great United States of America, the thought of the end of our last road trip crossed my mind a few times. If you remember, our road trip in 2015 ended with a mad dash from South Dakota to Washington, D.C. We front-loaded the trip with…
Planning road trips with young kids can be a daunting task! What will I do to keep them entertained? How many times will I hear “Are we there yet?” from the backseat? Will they even enjoy the places we visit? All of these questions and more were some reasonable concerns I had before departing on the open road with my little ones. Today I’m sharing 7 tips (that I have used!) to get young kids involved and interested in a road trip!…
After 18 days, thousands of miles, and countless memories made, we completed our first cross-country road trip with our kids! It was an awesome adventure and we will most definitely do it again (and have since!). But we learned a few things on this road trip that we hope to implement next time. Space out the driving days throughout the road trip I talked about this briefly during my last few posts about the road trip, but this was our…
Ruckersville, Virginia Our last several days of driving were long and scenic. As we approached the Appalachian Mountains, the fall colors became more vibrant and the beautiful farms and horse pastures that lined the highway were just beautiful. We spent the night after St. Louis in a beautiful rural campground in Kentucky. We enjoyed a stunning sunset behind a field with trees painted in fall colors just outside our camper door. We continued our drive the next day to…
If you’ve been following our road trip in chronological order, you’ve probably noticed that we crammed A LOT of sightseeing into the trip so far. Due to a planning error on our part, the second half of our trip was filled with many long days of driving and not a lot of sight-seeing. Luckily we learned from this and spaced out the driving more evenly on our next road trip. Leaving The West Behind After two very long days of driving, we arrived…