Day #3 - Saturday, May 24

We got up on Saturday morning with the idea of going to Cade's Cove for a little while and then taking the children swimming or something else (just relaxing basically). All in all, it should take about 2 hours to go through Cade's Cove if you stop and go in all the cabins (some are a bit off the road and you have to walk to them), and about 45 min - 1 hour to just drive through and look at those that are close to the road (this of course doesn't include hiking any of the trails there). We had no intention of taking all the children walking up to all the cabins and such, so we were only planning on doing the driving tour and going inside the cabins and churches that were close to the road.


WELL, what should have taken less than 1 hour took 6 hours to do. It is a one way dirt road and there are signs everywhere saying "DO NOT STOP IN THE ROAD, USE THE PULL OFFS ON THE SIDE" ...well, needless to say, people obviously can't read!!! People were stopping in the middle of the road to run out into the woods and take pictures of turkey and deer! WHAT IS SO EXCITING ABOUT A TURKEY OR A DEER??? A bear, maybe - and yes, we did get some pictures of a bear, but we used the pull offs to do it, lol ;) but not a turkey!


Anyway, it took 6 hours to get through there because of all the nuts stopping in the road. My husband was about to have a FIT! And I nearly had a stroke because the people in front of us were in a big SUV also and they had a baby (about 10 months old) HANGING out the window in the backseat going on this driving tour. The window was all the way down and the child was out of the window from the waist up...I couldn't pay attention to anything else for fear of that baby falling out and being ran over!


BUT, we did get some great pictures and the children loved all the creeks and rivers that we saw - Madalyn loves rocks, so she was able to get some beautiful ones for her collection.


Here are some photos from our trip up to Cade's Cove:

As I mentioned before, when we were at Cade's Cove we saw a bear! Here are some pictures of it:

That night after we FINALLY made it back home, we had tickets to the Dixie Stampede. This is an awesome dinner show! The food was great and the show was amazing! We all loved it!

After the show that night, the children did some shopping in the gift shop and then we were off to the cabin. It had been another LONG, but FUN day.

Our plans for the next day were to go back to Dollywood and be there when the gates opened. That was OUR plan - obviously, God had other ideas! Find out on Day #4 about our most "hair raising" ride of all - and NO, it wasn't at an amusement park!!!