Exploring the American Landscape
Shannon 
In what will certainly be the first of many, many national park camping experiences, we spent several days camped at Elkmont Campground inside Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This put us out of cell phone range and right at the heads of several excellent trails, an outstanding combination for days of uninterrupted fun. Our biggest … Read more
Camping near Oak Ridge, Tennessee gave us the opportunity to visit one of the newest parks on the NPS menu: the Manhattan Project National Historical Park. This park is somewhat unique because it consists of three separate and far-flung sections in three different states, and also because all the locations are active sites owned by … Read more
Our travels through Eastern Tennessee gave us the chance to visit several of the national sites that are helping guide our journey, and these locations near Chattanooga preserve and interpret records of historic periods ranging from 10,000 BC to 1865. Russell Cave National Monument Tucked away down a small county road in the very northeastern … Read more
Given our credentials as certified space junkies, our trip through northern Alabama naturally needed to include a stop in Huntsville, home of the Redstone Arsenal and the U.S. Space and Rocket Center. U.S. Space & Rocket Center Huntsville earned its place in U.S. space history by serving as the site of the rocket development program. … Read more
On our way north from Tuskegee, we visited our first National Military Park: Horseshoe Bend. This small park includes the location of the decisive final battle in the Creek War in 1814, which resulted in the Creek people relinquishing to the newly independent United States their claims to over 23 million acres of land in … Read more