We’re currently in Picayune MS visiting my daughter and her family.  I’ve promised each of the grandkids a trip for their 11th birthday and Kyle asked to see snow.  A couple of weeks ago a large weather storm moved through our area, dumping LOTS of rain, and 4-8″ of snow was predicted for the Smoky Mountains.  Since they are pretty close to where we are and we could do a long weekend, Kyle and I boarded a plane and headed to Atlanta GA.  From there we drove just a few hours up into the Smoky Mountains.

Well, the weather forecasters were wrong!  Such a small amount of snow fell that it was pretty much all gone by the time we go tthere.  We did find a small patch along the road where we pulled over and Kyle got to feel it and make a small snowball.

Just driving into the mountains was a new experience for Kyle – coming from the coastal part of Mississippi, he had never seen hills, let along mountains!  He did a great job of navigating using my iPad map app, and he took several pictures of the mountains, some in the morning showed a lot of the misty smoke that gave the mountain area its name.

We continued into the mountains to Cherokee, NC which we knew was one of the higher points in the Smoky Mountains.  Again, no snow.  I wanted to head over the mountain pass on I-441 ending in Gatlinburg TN, but a rockslide had closed the pass so we headed east again.

We found the Scaly Mountain Outdoor Center the next morning – just what we wanted!  They blow snow onto a tubing run and have an outdoor ice skating rink.  Kyle had a blast!!  The lines for the tubing run were never more than 15 minutes long and were great fun – in his words “AWESOME”.  He was a novice to ice skating, but within an hour was gliding around and doing spins!  I posted a video of him ice skating on YouTube: http://youtu.be/7kBOx3i8AGs.  A 3-hour pass to do both activities was just $30.

We found a motel by 3pm that day near Franklin NC and the motel manager suggested we make a trip to the Fun Factory in Franklin.  It was a great place to round out the trip.  We bowled, played mini-golf, Kyle got to ride the go-carts and have fun in the laser-tag arena.  There were also lots of video games.  By the time we settled in for the night we were both pretty tired!

The next day we headed back to Atlanta and flew home.  What a great trip!  Here are some pictures: