The premise of this trip is that I had a work training at my company’s office in Raleigh, NC and I took the opportunity to see some National Parks in the south (with Felix, of course).

We were supposed to fly to Nashville on Saturday afternoon, but our flight was cancelled because of a Nor’easter blowing through Boston. We found out about the cancellation late on Friday night and were able to re-book a flight that was leaving at 6 am on Saturday morning. After some frantic packing and only two hours of sleep (Felix didn’t sleep at all) we arrived at the airport only to find out that our connecting flight had been delayed by 4 hours.

It was a long travel day but we arrived safely in Nashville, rented a car, and drove to Kentucky to just outside of Mammoth Cave National Park.

On Sunday we headed into the park to start our day with the 8:45 am Extended Historic Tour. The tour group group was about 50 people. We took a short walk to the historic entrance to the cave, which is a quintessential, big-hole-in-the-earth cave entrance.

We walked for a bit through a corridor that was just high enough to stand in and maybe 20 feet wide. Then the cave opened up into a huge corridor which easily could have fit a house. The cave is pretty dimly lit and they don’t allow flash photography, so it was hard to get any photos that properly convey the size of this cave. Our guide told us the passages were an ancient underground river.

Given that this was the historic tour, our guide told us lots of history of the cave. There’s evidence of indigenous people exploring miles of the cave. During the war of 1812, enslaved people mined for saltpeter which was used to create gunpowder. At one point, a doctor purchased the cave and built huts for people to live in the cave because he thought the clean air could treat tuberculosis. It didn’t—and those poor tuberculosis patients had to live for months in the endless dark and silence of the cave.

During one point of the tour the guides turned off the lights to let us see what the cave looked like to early people experiencing it through lantern light. Then the guide blew out his lantern so we could see the complete darkness, which was cool. I have no pictures of this.

Some part of the tour were in big caverns and some parts were tight paths. We walked through a path called “Fat Man’s Misery” which has a thin path and a low ceiling, but wasn’t that tight.

This tour was pretty fun. We had a great, charismatic tour guide who told stories that always revolved around men named John.

We took a short break for lunch and then met up with our group for our second tour of the day, the Domes and Dripstones Tour. This second tour group was huge—120 people. The tour met at the visitor center but we boarded buses that took us to a different cave entrance than the Historic tour used. This entrance was just a door in the woods.

The door led to a series of stairs that descended through slots in the cave. This part was super cool. There were areas where the stairs went through narrow areas with rocks protruding into the path, and areas where you could see the floor way below you.

This tour was focused on geology, so the tour guide told us about how the cave was formed. This region has a lot of limestone, which is soluble and good for making caves, but Mammoth Cave has a big layer of impermeable sandstone above it. This means the water has to wind its way pretty deep underground before it gets to this area, creating the many long tunnels of Mammoth cave, which is the world’s longest cave. The guide also explained that they measure length based on surveyed passageways. If a human can’t fit in it, it doesn’t count as part of the cave.

We passed through some more long passageways that weren’t as big as the ones on the historic tour. Right at the end, we came to an area called Frozen Niagara which has stalactites and a big flowstone formation. Mammoth cave is pretty dry, so it doesn’t have a lot of formations, but Frozen Niagara is the exception.

That was our last activity in Mammoth Cave NP. The park does have some hiking trails but we didn’t have a ton of time and I figured the cool stuff was in the cave. They offer about a dozen different tours that visit different parts of the cave, and even different caves within the park. If I ever found myself in middle-of-nowhere Kentucky again, I’d happily go back to try a different tour.

We drove 5 hours to Gatlinburg, TN to spend the night outside of our next destination: Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

We woke up early the next morning to do the Alum Cave Bluffs & Arch Rock trail. This might be the most popular hike in the park and I heard the parking lot fills quickly. Felix thought I was being too conservative, given that it was a random Monday morning, but the parking lot was indeed full when we arrived at 8:30 am. Thankfully we got a spot at a pullout just down the road. The trail follows a stream all the way to Arch Rock, where it crosses the stream via a one-log bridge and then forms a staircase going under the Rock. I loved Arch Rock. It looked so whimsical—like a portal to a faerie realm.

Along the hike we got some views of the mountains, which look like every mountain in New England (except the NE mountains have some pretty foliage around now).

We kept hiking until we reached the Alum Cave Bluffs, which is just a big rock overhang. I was not super impressed by this. We took a snack break and then hiked back to the car. This hike was 4.6 miles in total.

At least I got to see Arch Rock on the way back.

Next we drove to the Kuwohi Observation Tower, which is located at the highest point in the park, right on the boarder between Tennessee and North Carolina. There was a brutally steep half-mile walk up a hill to the observation tower. The view was nice I guess. I’m just not that impressed by mountains covered in trees.

It was late afternoon at this point so we headed back to Gatlinburg for lunch. I was excited to find that Gatlinburg has custom manhole covers (something only a sewer engineer could be excited about).

We chilled for a bit at our hotel, which had a balcony directly over a stream. I had some more hikes I had intended to do but we were pretty wiped out.

When we first drove to Gatlinburg from Kentucky, we drove through Pigeon Forge, which is like a family-friendly Vegas of the South. We passed a ton of mini golf courses, arcades, mountain coasters, a replica of the titanic, and a gift shop advertising live alligators.

I was overwhelmed by the offerings of Pigeon Forge so I hadn’t planned for us to do anything there during the trip, but Felix suggested we go see the Pirate Voyage Dinner & Show as our evening activity. The show takes place in a big custom-built theater with a pool and two big pirate ships. When we walked in, they had two parrots flying in circles around the theater and I was immediately sold. It’s a pretty cheesy show with moderately good circus but I was having a great time watching it. The performers were constantly swinging around the set and doing flips as they dove into the pool.

They had an aerials act with mermaids on giant anchors and I could see that the mermaids were doing static trapeze moves, which is the apparatus I currently do. Maybe I should quit engineering and be a professional mermaid.

There was also an act with a trained sea lion, which we (particularly Felix) loved. In the act the sea lion was trying to sneak on to a ship to steal some treasure. It was cute. And the sea lion could do a handstand!

After the show, we went to a nearby place called Lost Mine Mountain Coaster and Mini Golf. I don’t have any photos of us on the coaster but it was fun. I haven’t tried mini golf (or any kind of golf) since I was a young kid but Felix said I was surprisingly good at it. My dad would be proud.

The theme of the course seemed to be that a mining operation was taken over by woodland animals. It wasn’t super clear. I thought it was funny that all the water was dyed blue, which is something I had noticed on many of the mini golf places we passed on the road. That was all for our activities in Pigeon Forge.

The next morning we headed back into the park for our second and final day in the Smokies. Our day’s activities were on the North Carolina side of the park, so we drove the main road through the whole park. At one point we got a view of the classic fog over the mountains.

We made a quick stop at Mingus Mill, a historic grist mill. The Mill uses a flume and a water turbine, rather that a water wheel, to power its machinery. In my (nearly) Professional Engineer opinion, I think the flume might be leaking.

Our main activity of the day was to hike the Deep Creek Waterfalls Loop, a 2.4 mile hike that took us to three different waterfalls. It was a pretty easy hike and the waterfalls were nice.

Next we went to the Road to Nowhere, a quarter mile long tunnel that was part of a highway project that was never finished. We walked through it and it gets kind of spooky in the middle. It was very dark and I could barely make out anything around me but I could still see the light at the end. I had planned to do this tunnel as part of a longer hike, but Felix and I weren’t feeling up for it.

This was our last activity in the Smoky Mountains. The Smokies are known for having lots of black bears, which I was hoping to see while we were in the park. As we were leaving, we very briefly saw a black bear cub scurrying off the road and into the woods. I guess that’s the best I’ll get.

We had a 5-hour drive to Raleigh, NC, where we stayed for the next 3 days as I attended my work training. This was mostly boring work stuff, but while in town, we saw some of our friends who live in the area. On Wednesday night we got dinner with Felix’s friend, Laura, who is a doctor.

On Thursday night we got dinner with our friend, and former cheerleading teammate, Elise, who is attending Physician’s Assistant school at Duke. We got Chinese food, including peking duck, which was really good.

After my work training ended on Friday afternoon, we drove to Columbia, SC and stayed the night. On Saturday morning, we drove into our final National Park of the trip: Congaree.

We started the day with a guided kayak tour of Cedar Creek, which is one of the rivers that runs through the park. The river was pretty shallow and extremely calm with almost no current. The group went at a very slow pace and we basically drifted downriver with occasional paddling.

The park is on a flood plane and during certain parts of the year, the river spreads into the surrounding forest and you can kayak among the trees. Our guides pointed out trail markers high in the trees that mark the river path so kayakers don’t get lost when the whole forest is flooded. That sounded cool. On the day we were there however, the river was at quite a low level.

We saw lots of Cyprus trees with their big trunks and their roots poking out of the ground which are referred to as the tree’s knees.

At one point we saw a river otter that was pestering a fisherman and trying to steel his fish. The tour guides said they very rarely saw otters, so this was quite cool. I couldn’t get a good picture of it.

That was kind of the only interesting thing on the tour. The tour guides say they often see snakes in trees near the river but we didn’t see any. The only other wildlife we saw was one turtle on a log. This activity was ok, I guess. It was nice and peaceful but the tour was three hours of slow drifting. It’s probably a lot more interesting if the forest is flooded.

Next we went to the visitor center where I saw the infamous Mosquito Meter. Online I’ve seen Congaree regarded as one of the worst National Parks because it’s full of mosquitoes and its trails are often flooded. I guess we came during a chill time of year because the mosquitoes meter was set to 1.

We walked the 2.6 mile boardwalk trail from the visitor center which goes through a forest. Congaree is a National Park because it’s one of the largest old-growth bottomland hardwood forests, whatever that means. This boardwalk was fine. It wasn’t flooded.

The boardwalk went to a lake where we saw a bunch of turtles. We saw some decently big trees and some swamp. That’s kind of it.

This park is not that big and doesn’t have that many trails. We could’ve taken a longer hike to the river that we kayaked down but I’d gotten my fill and we needed to head to the airport. As far as National Parks go, this sure is one.

I’m now up to 29 National Parks! On the day we went to Congaree, I learned that Chiricahua National Monument, which I’ve been to, had a bill pass through congress to become a National Park. If it does, my NP count will be at 30!

We flew back to Boston on Saturday night, and on Sunday I went to a Renaissance fare with my acro friends and my brother who happened to be in town for a wedding. Who needs rest? The fun never stops!

Thanks for reading!

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Bonus sibling pics: