The day of firsts: warning lots of pictures

The kids visited their first National Park--Smokey Mountain National Park to be exact. It was a big day, although I'm fairly certain that they were all pretty clueless as to what we were even going to do when we told them what we were going to do. Here were some of the comments: "Will there be a pool there?" "Can we all go in?" Nathan: "Are we still in 'tucky?" Poor guy is so confused! We also had the following ping pong conversation all day: Nathan: "Where are the bears? I want to see a bear." John (freaking out): "No, I don't want to see a bear!!" Here are some pics from the day:
Our first Nat'l Park trail and certainly won't be our last. The kids wanted to walk a lot more, but we just didn't have the time.
Their first waterfall--I know it's not a real big one, but we knew they'd be impressed just the same. Notice how impressed Nathan is; he has no idea what he is suppose to be fascinated with. However, he does thing the creek in front of him would be a lot of fun!
Our family: perfect with the first take!

Cades Cove, need I say more?

The girls and the boys

Their first experience with a mountain river.

I must say, and I think I can speak for Joe, this was the highlight of our vacation. I grew up spending my summers traveling visiting this great country that we live in. I've seen all the lower 48 states and visited too many National Parks to count and I loved every minute of it (okay, so maybe I didn't enjoy driving across Kansas with it being 102 in an old Chevy Nova with no air conditioning and only one small cloud in the sky or the time I woke up in Goodland, KS (again!) with the tent floating on at least a foot of water... I could probably go on--the memories abound). Anyway, I would like to pass even just a little bit of that on to my kids and hopefully this was a good beginning. Happy July 4th eve everyone!