Fall Creek Falls

The last leg of our cross country tour was in Fall Creek Falls State Park just outside of Nashville. I'd been wanting to visit for awhile, so it worked out perfectly. We arrived in the evening and did a little driving around before setting up our camp. We were pretty unprepared food wise, but thankfully FCF is massive and includes a store, restaurant, and snack bar. We opted to go to the store and cooked up a fabulous meal of Ramen, beef jerky, and macaroni & cheese. (We'd had a pretty hearty lunch in Knoxville.)

The most exciting part of our evening was seeing deer at every turn. They were huge and they were everywhere.

In the morning, the monkeys were very anxious to hit the road and get home to their XBox, but we managed to get them focused on enjoying our last day of vacation. They suited up, had a little breakfast, helped us break down the camp, and then we went to check out the sites.

Our first stop was the Gorge Hole, also known as the George Hole, due to a typo or whatever you call it when someone carves extra letters into a wooden sign.

Although this was pretty cool. we knew that there had to be more. Oh, and we were so right. Check out Cane Creek Falls! It had a built in slide.

Warren and I were really jealous that we didn't put on our bathing suits. We waffled several times, and almost put them on, but decided against it since we still had a long drive ahead. But man, we are going back and next time we will be ready!

We couldn't leave without actually seeing Fall Creek Falls. We started hiking there, but once we realized it was 2 miles and we had no snacks or water, we turned back and drove over instead. We were simply stunned when we saw how big the falls were--256 feet!

You can totally hike down to the bottom and swim there too. Did I mention that we are definitely going back? I've almost convinced warren to rent one of these babies for a week.

He actually said FCF reminded him of California. That's just about the biggest compliment he's got. (I guess reminding him of Alaska would be the pinnacle.)

Unfortunately, I've pretty much blown my vacation time for the year, but I might be able to squeak out a few more days.

It was the perfect ending to a near perfect vacation. We had some serious quality family time, got to see some really good friends, and saw amazing new things everywhere we went. It doesn't get any better than that.