By Gary Lloyd

This column is a sequel.

A year and a half ago, I nostalgically wrote about Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the most popular tourist destination within five hours north of here.

I wrote about the T-shirt shops that dominate the Parkway, the Food City that you must push a shopping cart through if you want your cabin fridge stocked for the week, the need for cash in your wallet if you plan on eating at Pancake Pantry.

I finished out that column by detailing how my wife and I spent our honeymoon there in 2013 and babymoon in 2019, and several times in between. We had not been back since 2019, nor on any other vacation, for that matter. We vowed to take our toddler son there for his first trip. We had shown him Facebook albums full of photos from the Parkway, inside the Ripley’s Aquarium of the Smokies, along the winding roads of Cades Cove.

Well, just before Christmas, we took him. We went to all the usual places, ate all the usual meals. We spent the first full day at Pancake Pantry for breakfast, Ripley’s Aquarium, Fannie Farkle’s, No Way Jose’s for lunch, Kilwin’s for afternoon ice cream, and more along the Parkway. Our second day was spent pinballing around Pigeon Forge, to general stores and Christmas villages to Jurassic Park jungle boat rides and WonderWorks.

Day three was mostly spent at Cades Cove taking in the scenery and wildlife. I brought my camera, of course, and my son brought the one he got for Christmas. That made me happy. The early evening we spent making s’mores in the backyard of our rental home. Our final full day was dubbed “Random Day,” during which we ate at Crockett’s Breakfast Camp, gawked at a black bear on the Roaring Fork Motor Trail, cruised down slides at Mynatt Park, and fed everything from rabbits to elk to zebras at the Smoky Mountain Deer Farm & Exotic Petting Zoo.

There was, of course, a lot more. A lot of Christmas lights in Sevierville, a lot of credit card swipes in random arcades, a lot of it’s-December-so-they-don’t-count calories, a lot of toddler feelings bigger than those Great Smoky Mountains.

The trip had its stresses, no doubt, and I suppose a first vacation with your child – and a dog who will steal graham crackers from around the fire pit – is a parental rite of passage of sorts. But the trip also had incredible highs, moments which, despite having an excitable toddler in tow, somehow slowed me down. Our son gazing around Pancake Pantry slowed me down. The fact that you can pay there now with a credit card and the vintage cash register has disappeared straight-up shocked me. The calories definitely slowed me down. Seeing the Christmas lights twinkle in my son’s wide-open eyes slowed me down. Taking photos of him all over Cades Cove certainly slowed me down.

The trip, as everyone says, went by too fast. But it had slow moments. I hope, for at least the next 15 years, the slow moments pile as high as the Great Smoky Mountains.

Gary Lloyd is the author of six books and a contributing writer to the Cahaba Sun.