VeggieMountainMama: Weekending

Hello friends, today we had an awesome day out in the sun. I made "White Pig" blueberry pancakes for the family this morning, while making food for our planned picnic and pasta sauce for our Sunday night spaghetti tradition. I came to the realization today that I post a lot about food...this may be due to the fact that I love food and I love to cook. So I am thinking about a Monday "What's cooking" post on a weekly basis to share what I have cooked and for others to share what they are cooking. What do you think? The only thing I am not sure about is the format so that I can get people to link their "What's cooking" post onto mine and for all to see...any ideas? Or is that not even possible through blogger? Anyway to get on with this post, by 11am we were ready to get on our way to the Smokeys. We went through Maggie Valley and Cherokee and after quite a bit of wrong turns, we finally made our way into Smokey Mountain National Park. It was a gorgeous day and the kids had a ton of fun.

The View from Clingman's dome.

Wildflowers were everywhere, a picture of the actual Smokey Mountains(notice all of the dead trees, I read that some bug that came over from another country is killing the trees), and then the most perfect frasier fir...this makes me yearn for Christmas time.

We saw a sign for the appalachian trail and decided to take off onto the trail. I dream of one day hiking a big portion of the trail and maybe even one day doing a full thruhike. This made my day. It was a very rocky and wet trail, but the kids did beautifully and Rian kept exclaiming how much he loves to hike now. Lovely.