As a family we have decided to take advantage of our family time by traveling together in our Jayco Jay Flight trailer. We plan to keep family and friends up to date on our travels via this blog.

Chris and I feel very strongly that there are a relative short number of years that we have to create bonds, and therefore have influence in our childrens lives. And so we want to take full advantage of these fleeting moments. A few months ago we made an investment in the time we have left with our children young. We purchased a travel trailer with an initial goal of traveling this summer to Yellowstone.

The first thought of it was very daunting for me. To pack for a family a of four for two weeks? Where do you even begin? Everything we needed for two weeks, clothes, toiletries, towels, entertainment for the kids, food, kitchen utensils, the list is endless it seems.

So we decided we should have at least one or two test trips. Spring break was the perfect opportunity for our first.

I have traveled to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSM) at least 30 times. As a child I went every year with our family. As an adult we have continued that tradition and mixed in our own trips with just the four of us. Because we know the area and route so well, and because of the sheer beauty that is the GSM, it was a great choice for our inaugural journey.

We stayed at the Pigeon Forge KOA. I had never stayed at a KOA before and I was pretty nervous about our first trip, but most of my apprehension has now been put to rest. The KOA had plenty for our kiddos (5 and 7) to do. A bouncing blob, nice new playground, gem mine, planned activities and probably best of all, lots of built in friends. The weekend we traveled was Spring Break for many and our kiddos had lots of other kids their age at the campground to pal around with.

Of course we ventured off KOA grounds for our day trips before returning to cook dinner and catch up with new friends. The first full day of our trip we intended to hike a couple miles. We chose a trail in Elkmont for our hike. Elkmont was perfect as it didn’t require a long drive to the trail head and it is in a valley so there isn’t a huge elevation change to drain us. We hiked Jake’s Creek to Cucumber Gap to Little River. Cucumber Gap was teeming with wildflowers. So thick they appeared to create a carpet in places. There are several places where streams intersect the trail which were an added diversion and a welcomed opportunity to roll up our pant legs.

Unfortunately, I made a mistake in reading the trail map and instead of a relatively short hike of a mile or two we ended up hiking 5.5 miles! However, if we hadn’t hiked the longer distance we wouldn’t have seen a beaver on the creek bank along the Little River trail.

We made it back to the truck and had a big picnic complete with fudge stripe cookies. So all was forgiven.

There were a few take-aways from our first trip:

• Double check the trail map

• Sometimes it is good to break from the planned agenda, you never know what cool, unexpected, things you might see

• You can never have enough underwear.

That last one is a story for another day.

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Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton