Great Smokey Mountain National Park - Day 1

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The majority of day one was spent driving from our house to the Smokies. We left relatively early, around 8:30 am, to make the 4.5 hour drive, arriving at our campground (Smokemont) around lunchtime. First order of business was eating, next, to set up camp. After everything was squared away we decided to go on a hike.
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We struck off on the Smokemont Loop Trail that circles around the campsite. It was super hot and humid (like always) and we were sweating before we even began haha. The first 45 min of the hike was uphill nonstop; not exactly what I had expected, but a good foreshadow of what was to come. The area is really green with lots of trees so it was  really pretty; we didn't catch any views though. Eventually we reached the apex of the hike and started going downhill. About 15 min later we had our first bear encounter. It was a little scary, but nothing bad. The thing wasn’t all that big and black bears aren’t typically aggressive anyways. We watched it for the bit and then I made a loud clap and shouted “hey!” and it took off into the brush. We continued on our hike without incident. which ended up being about 6 miles and taking around 2.5 hours. A good warm up for the week to come.
Upon returning to camp we immediately changed into our swimsuits and took off for the little river/stream that ran by the campground. It was cold, but felt super refreshing getting in and rinse off after the hike. Afterword’s we went back to our site and started on dinner. We had steak, asparagus, cherries, and blackberry cobbler with vanilla ice cream for dessert. All was good and we had almost finished up with the dinner portion when the clouds decided to open up on us.
We kind of scrambled to clean up the food and get the dutch oven (full of cooking cobbler) under a tree and out of the rain. We managed to save most everything but the chairs… they got soaked haha. It rained for a good while and we eventually gave up trying to wait it out and just camped out in the car for the rest of the night. John had downloaded a couple podcasts of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. He's a self taught expert on WWI, a subject neither of us really know much about, and has 4 4-hour podcasts on the topic. We started in on the first episode during the drive and decided to finish it off. It sounds dorky I know, but is pretty interesting and educational. Dan is really good at narrating and explaining it all too. That being said, you can only sit in a car and listen to podcasts for so long; it did get a bit old.
We got out to grab some cobbler but immediately got back in to eat it because it was still raining. The cobbler sure was tasty though, haha. The rain never really stopped, but eventually turned into a kind of misting. John was able to start a fire, but without dry chairs to sit on it wasn’t much fun, so we ended up going to bed pretty early that night.

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