Day 5

Well, the night was definitely dry but not quiet.  I'm guessing Friday night is the time when most people arrive as just about every site around us had packed up that morning. About 11pm then again about midnight, people were still arriving, unpacking and noisily setting up their sites. I'm not sure if I'm just an overly considerate camper or just pain naive, but I find this really annoying! At least the kids slept through it I think.

When I woke up I headed to the nature trail to see if I could get any interesting pictures. Usually the best weather for photos is overcast so there aren't any shadows, but I really wanted some sun to be peeking through these skyscraper trees. With all the rain the day before, the river was rumbling nicely, but the sun wasn't ready to come out just yet.

I grabbed my laptop and wrote a little while since it was still quiet hours until 6am. Once everyone started milling around a little bit I started packing up.  Fortunately I'd planned an easy car breakfast and prepacked a little the night before so once the kids got up we were ready to go in about an hour.  Not bad!!

We stopped by the visitor's center to turn in the kids' junior ranger books. After talking to each of them about all the programs we'd been to, she happily swore them in. Nothing in there this time about eating their vegetables or listening to mom though.

We had a bit of a drive today so we started the audiobook version of a book both Brayden and I had already read but thought the girls would enjoy - Janitors. We tucked in behind a line of motorcycles onto the Blue Ridge Parkway headed for our next stop. We'd traveled on several different stretches of this fantastic drive before, but never this one so I was excited. Within a few minutes we were 5000 ft up looking down on the visitor's center we'd just been to.The views of course were spectacular and the kids enjoyed all the tunnels through the mountains. I peeked at the GPS and our route looked like a 2 year old had scribbled back and forth.  I knew it was absolutely going to be a fun drive!

The other exciting part of my day was walking back into my store, Trader Joe's. I'm sure you get tired of me talking about it here, but every summer I look forward to walking in there.  We stocked up on a bunch of snacks and produce, some tuna burgers for dinner, and most certainly some cookie butter.

This store is in Asheville, which is one of my favorite towns. I'd thought about walking around with the kids a little while but instead put it on our list for when Dave is with us as a possibility. We still had quite a ways to go so we stopped by a McDonalds for a snack and wifi to update the blog, then headed back toward the parkway.

  After some interesting county roads, we ended up at a teeny little state park on a river. With it being 91 outside the first thing we did is head down to the water. I didn't take the camera since we were just coming down to check it out before setting up, but the kids were having so much fun we stayed for a little while. Laney and I put our feet in the little rapids for a natural foot soak, now we just need our pedicures!

Once the sun seemed to be ready to hide behind the clouds for awhile, we headed up to set up our site. There was a sliver of shade the kids gravitated toward to play while I cooked and prepped all the produce we'd picked up. We retreated to a shady grassy spot for dinner and talked about what we wanted to do for the evening. They decided they just wanted to play so I cleaned up and got things ready for the night ahead.

Some of our days are action packed with museums and programs and others are just regular days on the road!