Driving the Blue Ridge Parkway day (to Asheville)

Thursday, March 28

Thursday was such a wonderful day! On the agenda was driving the Blue Ridge Parkway (a scenic route that snakes the “long way” through the mountains to Asheville, North Carolina).

I went back and forth when planning this trip originally; I’d heard such good things about Asheville that my original plan was to focus more on the Asheville area and just only do a little bit of the Smokies.

Actually, my original original plan was to do a big loop from Wisconsin to Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia for a couple days (which is another destination I really want to take the boys before they’re grown), then stop to see friends in Cary, NC for a night and then loop over to Asheville for a few days, then home.

But then it turned out these friends were also planning to travel (2.5 weeks in Spain!) over spring break, so that was out…. and I also realized the drive would kind of be a bit uncomfortably long for the days off we had to work with, anyway. I think I’d rather maybe save Williamsburg and do a Williamsburg/ Yorktown/Jamestown and Virginia Beach trip sometime!

So then I decided we’d skip Virginia for now and just go to Asheville primarily, with a side of the Smokies maybe for a day or two. But then I realized how much there was in the Smokies area, and it just ended up making more sense to reverse things and base ourselves in the Smokies and do a side trip to Asheville!

Anyway! There’s a little peek into my brain and how our trip ideas sort of surface, grow, and evolve as I figure stuff out. 🙂

So. I had hotel rooms booked for Thursday night in Asheville, and Thursday’s daytime plan was to slowly make our way there. I was excited for this! I’d heard the Blue Ridge Parkway was just beautiful.

We started our drive by mid-morning. In my trip prep, I had found a blog post outlining some of the best stops along the route. (There are countless overview/lookout points, as well as a bunch of hikes, waterfalls, etc that are possible stopping places as well.)

I had them all bookmarked on Google maps, which was great….except there is VERY spotty cell service all throughout the Smokies (and apparently the remote Blue Ridge Parkway, too). I fortunately had anticipated this and had saved all the main points I wanted to stop at in a Google Doc (accessible without cell service). But it was still pretty tricky, as I’d frequently lose the ability to see names of places on my map. Instead of saying like, “Thunder Struck Ridge” overlook, it would just show me a dot that something was there, with the latitude and longitude coordinates. Um. What do I look like, Lewis and Clark?! 😂

Luckily most of the Parkway has very clearly marked signs at each overlook/ trailhead (UNLIKE inside the National Park, where I truly think they could do much, much better in this regard).

Here was one of our first stop offs! The first ~30% or so was still within the National Park boundaries, so not technically the Blue Ridge Parkway yet. (This is Newfound Gap Rd, or Hwy 441, which joins up with the BR Parkway later.)

So beautiful!

I liked the look of this tunnel. There were quite a few cool tunnels!

We weren’t on any specific timeline or anything- just figured we’d stop at as many of the places as we could, keeping an eye on the clock, and speed up or slow down accordingly.

This stop was a random one that was empty- just a short little dirt trail down from the parking area. It was so pretty! Unfortunately, while we had brilliant blue skies, Thursday was by far our coolest day temperature-wise. It was probably only in the upper 40s in the beginning!! Much colder than the 60s-70 degree weather the day before.

The water was so clear. Aren’t these multicolored rocks neat?

I don’t really have recorded which of these photos coincide which which of the various lookout points. If anyone is interested, this is the blog post I referenced. There are a bunch of different road trip itinerary ideas on this site!

We stopped off at somewhere that wasn’t on my list, but looked like a “climbable” waterfall/creek. The boys love that sort of thing, so they ran out to scramble up to the top.

It was very pretty there, but the parking area was pretty wide open and windy! And cold. So the adults basically waited in the car, here, after a brief look.

At another stop….Asher apparently decided that ~48 degrees is t-shirt weather. Hmmm.

I was pretty generally comfy in my layers. Had a lighter long sleeved top on, then a hooded sweatshirt, and then my puffy vest. I didn’t want to wear a big jacket since I knew we’d also be spending a lot of time in the car, where it’s easy to overheat.

Newfound Gap Overlook is a very popular stop (we were still inside the National Park here, also).

The Appalachian Trail actually crosses here, and it’s the Tennessee/North Carolina border as well. There were some hikers heading off onto the trail! Brrr. It was a bit chilly/windy for long distance hiking and camping, IMO. But it did warm up and was nice for the weekend, so maybe they were okay.

This was a high spot too, so also pretty windy. We did a lot of just pulling in to lookouts, hopping out, taking in the views and a few pics, and then back into the van to continue. It actually worked out well for Thursday to be our only really chilly day.

I kept trying to get a few really nice family pictures (thinking ahead to Christmas card possibilities, you know…haha)). This one is a good contender!

This is a great one of my parents, too:

Mingus Mill

Our next stop was an old mill that I think still operates during the summer (for show/ historical purposes only). It was closed now inside but we could walk around the grounds. It was very cool!

The boys liked climbing up to see the water running through it.

This placard gave us a nice overview of how the mill actually worked. Pretty interesting! Kind of amazes me that people so long ago figured all this stuff out without the internet. hehe.

Next up we stopped at another visitor center. If you recall, I wasn’t that impressed with the Sugarlands Visitor Center (the one closest to Gatlinburg). The Oconaluftee Visitor Center is much farther from Gatlinburg, and hence much less crowded. I found it to be much better overall, too.

The exhibits were very nicely done and it was just all quite attractive. And educational! We didn’t read everything, but spent maybe 30 minutes or so reading about the history of the park and the area.

We didn’t have time, but there’s a whole outdoor Mountain Museum here as well. You can see a bit of it here off to the left. We had already seen some of the old settler time period buildings in Cades Cove, plus the mill, so we decided to skip that. (I already knew there were way more stops along this route than we could possibly fit into one day’s drive.)

There were also some elk on the side of the road! I actually don’t have any pics but they were holding up traffic and a ranger had to go out and direct around them.

Blue Ridge Parkway

It was somehow already close to 2:00 before we officially hit the Blue Ridge Parkway! There are really no towns or cities along the way, but the turn-off/entrance is really close to the small town of Cherokee. So, since we were just generally disorganized with food on this trip, we didn’t have picnic stuff along. I had planned to just stop to grab something in Cherokee. (It’s just a very short detour out of the way to get to the town.)

There were not a TON of options, but as I had previously checked on the map, there were some decent ones. We almost went to a sit down bar/grill type lunch place, but ultimately decided that was going to take too long.

I kind of made the executive decision after some hemming and hawing that we should just get Dairy Queen. (We really never eat at Dairy Queen?? Though the kids love the blizzards. And I occasionally get a hankering for a Dairy Queen hot dog with ketchup and onion on it. (Also very rarely eat hot dogs! But when I do… DQ is a great choice.)

For some reason the inside was closed (staffing, I think), so we ended up ordering our food to go. Figured we could then drive up the Parkway and find a pretty spot nearby to stop and eat!

Here is our random roadside “picnic” spot:

Also nearby here is the Cherokee Indian Reservation, whose name I managed to cut out of the picture. I don’t think I’d ever seen an actual Indian Reservation, so I just found this interesting.

Soco Falls

One stop that was oddly not on the blog post list was Soco Falls. Technically this is not right along the Parkway, so maybe that’s why. But it’s just a maybe ~5 minute detour off down another side road toward some other teeny tiny town.

This waterfall is awesome!!! It could definitely compete with the “big, popular” falls (i.e. crowded ones) in the National Park, but was literally empty when we arrived. There were maybe 2 other families total by the time we left.

The little hike down is steep and could be tricky for super littles or older folks. But it was fine for us. My mom did stay at the top here, just to be safe. It’d be easy to trip or lose your footing. Requires some climbing over rocks, etc too.

But here it is! So so pretty. And, the temperature was warming up at this point! It was very pleasant out.

We spent a while just sitting down there and listening to the rush of the water. I really loved this spot! Highly recommend. In fact, I’d really recommend this entire route (especially the Blue Ridge Parkway) if you’re ever in the Smokies and looking to ditch some of the crowds. There were literally zero crowds anywhere along this route. Like, none!! Maybe one other car at most of the lookouts.

Here’s another Christmas card contender!! I think I like this one even better, with the boys’ bright t-shirts against the blue sky.

I also kept trying to stop anytime I felt like there was a good view of the iconic “layered” look of the Smoky Mountains. This was a good shot!

This was also near the highest elevation point. Clearly, 6,000 ft is not actually that high as far as mountains go. These are not the Rockies! But they are charming and beautiful in their own Smoky Mountain way.

By this point it was getting LATE!! We didn’t even hike on any of the trails, etc along the way, just due to lack of time. (Plus, it was still chilly, though warmer in the afternoon.)

There’s a short but steep hike you can do to this summit, and I was very tempted, since I’m sure views were great, and the light was “getting pretty” in the late afternoon. But we just didn’t have time, and it was getting colder again.

I wanted to stop at one last place, where supposedly the Vanderbilts used to have a mountain lodge (Buck Springs Lodge). It was 16 miles by horseback from the Vanderbilt Mansion in Asheville, and they used to bring guests out. We did a short hike here to see the site, but there’s really nothing left. Apparently it burned down in a fire some years back.

I also read somewhere that there is still a hunting cabin in the wood that George Vanderbilt used to sneak off to, but we couldn’t find it. I tried and tried to find it, but couldn’t. Oh well!

At the lodge site, the boys enjoyed pretending to fall off the cliff (of course, a ledge below… aren’t they sneaky… HA. Who would have guessed. 😉 )

And then, by this point, it was really getting late!! Almost 6 pm, I think. The roads were quite winding in this section and Ethan especially (in the way back of the van) was DONE.

I think he was getting a little queasy or something after all the driving. Fortunately we were almost done with the Parkway anyway, but we skipped a few final stops and opted to just drive straight on into Asheville.

We got to our hotel (I chose one in Biltmore Village, to be close to the Biltmore Estate (three guesses what we’re doing tomorrow!) and checked in. Suddenly I started feeling kind of yucky- just a little headache/ queasy.

I lay on the bed for a bit and scrolled around looking at restaurant options with Ivan, while my parents (in their own room) did the same. Asheville is known for their brewery scene, which as you know, is kind of our fav scene, too!

I had researched some in advance, kind of, but not really. I had flagged a few possibilities on the map, but hadn’t really looked at the menus. Turns out many are more of just taprooms (so no real restaurants), some had kind of “foodie” menus (know what I mean? Lots of sort of earthy fancy ingredients that I’m like.. uh… what is that…), etc.

Took a bit but we found a really great place! We went to Pack’s Tavern, which is located inside the oldest building in downtown Asheville! We did have to wait maybe 20-25 minutes, but not terrible.

It was very cute inside and had great beer and a really nice menu.

When researching online, a photo of these FRESH jalapenos on the pizza (not pickled ones, which I do NOT like) had caught my eye. So I already knew I wanted pizza!!! Yummy. It was delicious.

It got pretty late by the time all was said and done! We just got into Asheville a lot later than I had intended. But, we were having such a nice time stopping along the way, that I didn’t want to rush that, either…

We didn’t get our food until close to 9 I think! They closed at 10, but we weren’t actually out of there until almost 10:30. Whoops! Wasn’t planning on such a late evening here, but this is why we never, ever make dinner reservations! 😂😂 We are way too unpredictable/ play it by ear type people on vacation usually.

Phew, this was a super long recap!! Sorry! 😬 Due to all the various (but short) stops, this Blue Ridge Parkway day sort of felt like lots of little mini-excursions all in one. A wonderful, wonderful day! 🙂