Laurel Falls Hike in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

While in Tennessee last year, we went on the Laurel Falls hike in Smoky Mountains National Park. It's a very popular trail and we had a hard time finding parking. We drove up and down the road a ways and almost left before eventually finding someone just pulling out from a a small lot down the road. 

Roundtrip the hike is 2.6 miles and is described on the NPS website as moderate in difficulty, but we found it to be more on the easy side of moderate. We saw several preschool-elementary school aged kids on the hike and they seemed fine. Although there are some steep drop-offs, so you definitely wouldn't want to take kids who weren't familiar with hiking or who are rowdy on this hike!

Anyways, it was a nice hike. The weather was nice and while there was a fair amount of people on the hike, it wasn't too busy.

After the hike we drove up to an overlook at the Tennessee and North Carolina border and saw part of the Appalachian trail.

Have you ever been to Great Smoky Mountains National Park?

Currently

I guess I will try, yet again, to get back into blogging! At the end of September my mom and I flew to Washington state to visit my grandma. Little did we know that Hurricane Helene would be coming directly through our area. We had planned our trip to Washington months prior, so we didn't really know what to expect when we saw that Helene was coming through. 

It was surprising to see our area getting slammed by the hurricane considering how far inland we live in Upstate South Carolina. We had 14 inches of rain! With even more to the north and into western North Carolina. We got some pretty strong winds too. We weren't really worried about the house as we have no water or trees by our house, but my mom was getting notifications from the power company about our power going out. We did end up losing power for 3 days and our cable was out for almost 3 weeks. Not having TV wasn't a huge deal but a large majority of people in our area were without internet for 3+ weeks. So while we have a different internet provider our internet was really really slow because I'm guessing everyone was forced to use the hotspot on their phone. 

We were in Washington for two weeks and had a really nice time visiting my grandma. It was just really nice to spend time with her. We didn't get home from our trip until after midnight so on the drive back from the airport we weren't really able to see much of the destruction from the hurricane. But the next morning I was shocked to look out the front window and see almost all of the large trees across the street from us were gone! I wish I had a before picture but there was dozens of trees that came down. Since the hurricane came through at night I can't imagine how scary that must have been listening to those trees come down all night long! 

But since being back it's been so strange driving around and seeing trees down everywhere. Literally everywhere we go there are tons of trees down. One thing I've noticed is just how many trees came down directly next to peoples houses. Not on their houses fortunately, but right next to the house! So it's good to see that most people in our immediate area were safe! 

And then another thing that happened while we were gone was our fridge/freezer quit working. It was already not working very well before we left (the freezer wasn't staying as cold as it should) so I moved everything out of the freezer and most everything out of the fridge and sure enough, when we got back it wasn't working at all. It was 60 degrees in the fridge! Since we are renting they sent someone out to look at the fridge, found out it was going cost almost $900 (!!!) to fix the problem, and then we had to wait several days but we finally got a new fridge last week. Considering the house we are living in is only 6 years old, it's ridiculous that the fridge is already having a major problem like that. 

Anyways, it seems things are finally getting back to normal around here. I had hoped to come back from Washington and go on some hikes up in North Carolina to see the fall colors but that isn't going to be happening unfortunately. The areas where we like to hike were the areas affected by the severe flooding.

Watching - I've been enjoying watching the latest season of The Great British Baking Show on Netflix. I also watched the latest installment of Unsolved Mysteries. And I was glad to see Shark Tank and Dateline start up again!

Reading - I haven't really read anything particularly interesting lately, although Beyond Reasonable Doubt by Robert Dugoni comes out tomorrow and I am really looking forward to starting that! I really liked the first book in the series, Her Deadly Game. 

Buying - I haven't really purchased anything lately except for some pajamas. (I got this set: top | pants ) 

Looking forward to - Finally getting some real fall weather, whenever that may be! We got about a week of cooler weather when it almost got down to freezing at night and now it's back to being in the upper 70's all week. I am just over it. I have never been a fan of summer and hot weather and having about 7 months of summer is just too much! The leaves have just barely started changing color here! It's just so weird.

Starting - To begin thinking about Christmas presents for family. With Thanksgiving being so late this year I really need to get started on coming up with ideas. Have you started any Christmas shopping yet?

Eating - I recently made some homemade peanut butter cups and have been enjoying those!

Needing - To run some errands this week. I need to go to Costco, early voting starts today so I need to do that, and I also need to stop by Target.

What have you been up to lately?