We were headed down to Atlanta for work and pleasure in mid-March so we decided to stop in the Great Smoky Mountains for part of the day. It is a long drive with two small kids to make it from Philadelphia in one day so we decided to take a little detour and go through Great Smoky Mountains National Park to introduce our youngest to one of our favorite hikes – Grotto Falls on the Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail. It was a long drive but we made it into the Quality Inn Creekside in Downtown Gatlinburg for the night.
The next morning we woke up excited to spend the morning hiking to Grotto Falls. The Grotto Falls hike was our three year old’s first hike in a national park and we thought it would be fun to do it with our youngest as well. The park has free admission but we needed to go into the park visitor center to pick up the parking tag that is now required when you park here for more than 15 minutes. After acquiring the tag we headed over to the Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail to get started, when we hit a snag.
It turns out that the one way section of the motor trail was closed for the winter! Even though it was a beautiful, sunny 60-70 degree day and there were tons of people hiking, we were stopped by a barricade around two miles before the Grotto Falls parking area. We very briefly considered whether we should park and hike it up the road, but we ultimately wisely decided that with a long drive through the park and down to Atlanta still ahead of us, we couldn’t add a four mile round trip on top of the hike we had planned. Particularly with two small children.
Our past two trips to Grotto Falls have both been in August, and it didn’t even cross our mind to think that the road would be closed for winter given the weather. It turns out we were a few weeks early and it wouldn’t open for the season until the very end of March.
Disappointed, we backtracked to the go through the park south to Cherokee, NC where we could pick up a highway to Atlanta. We kept our spirits high hoping that we would find the herd of elk hanging out by the Oconaluftee visitor center, which is where we found them when we were there back in 2019.
We stopped at Newfound Gap for the view and a short hike on the Appalachian Trail. Newfound Gap sits at the intersection of the Appalachian Trail, the Tennessee-North Carolina border, and the main north-south road through the park. It was the site of a famous speech by President Franklin Roosevelt in September 1940 when he officially dedicated the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Max energetically bound up the trail and back in the lead. Lucy rode in style on Jayne’s Osprey backpack and managed to fall asleep by the photo at the end with the state border sign.
Piling back in the car, we continued south taking in the views and stopping sporadically for a little fun. When we got down to the visitor center we were disappointed that there were no elk in site, and had to settle for a stamp at the visitor center to commemorate the trip instead.
It was a short adventure through the park, and we missed out on doing the hike that we intended, but we were still so excited to be on the way to Atlanta, where a group of panda bears were awaiting us. We had tickets to see the pandas at the National Zoo in DC (much closer to our house) in the fall, and we ended up missing them by two days as they took off on a flight for China without fanfare before we expected.
————
One of our highlights of the year was easily our trip down to Atlanta to see the panda bears at the Atlanta Zoo. When we learned that the DC pandas were going to leave imminently, we bought tickets for the National Zoo and made plans to go down there for a day during the middle of the week. Not a day later and two days before our trip we got a call from our aunt that the pandas had left prematurely with no fanfare on a plane to China. So we were very disappointed and ended up postponing our trip to the DC zoo until later in the year. We knew that they were leaving soon, but we did not expect them to leave that soon!
This left the only remaining panda in the United States at the Atlanta Zoo. And they were scheduled to also leave – supposedly at some point in 2024 according to the Atlanta Zoo. The zoo had said that they would have plenty of time between when they announced they were leaving and when they would leave, but as we kept visiting other zoos the feedback was to definitely not wait and get down there as soon as we could. So when I found a conference in my field in Atlanta near the beginning of the year, we booked it.
Jayne and I have seen giant pandas before, but Lucy had not and Max did not remember his prior trip to the National Zoo because he was too young. For me, it had been more than 20 years since my family had spent the day at the Toledo Zoo in 1988 with family to see the two giant panda bears that were exhibiting there. But I was only 10 years old at the time and only have a few memories of the day more than thirty years later.
So we drove down to Atlanta a day early before my conference started and we spent the day at the zoo to see the pandas. We found an Airbnb near to the zoo, so it was a short drive down to the parking area for the zoo in the morning.
It ended up being kind of a crazy day for me, since I had a work emergency that I had to deal with off and on for most of the day. But I got to enjoy the pandas with the family and it was a beautiful day at the zoo, so no complaints here.
We visited the giant pandas again at the end of the day shortly before leaving.
While I was headed to my conference, Jayne and the kids used their time to go to the Atlanta Aquarium.
On the drive home we were lucky enough to catch the DC cherry blossoms!
Update: The pandas at the Atlanta Zoo departed in October 2024 for China. But there are now more pandas in the United States. The San Diego Zoo got a pair of pandas over the summer, and the National Zoo received two more pandas which we hope to visit next year in 2025.
