Our Elk River/Boone, North Carolina Trip

Our cabin. It was great!!
The kids, Mom, and I slept up here in the loft area.


Papa slept in the room downstairs.

The kids loved running up and down the hill outside the front door.

Brianne loved mining for gems. We went here the first day. The boys were asleep in the car. She found some amethyst, emerald, agate, and rose quartz. She loved it! She kept asking to go mining all weekend.

Our first day we went to Grandfather Mountain. It was neat listening to Papa talking about how the road to Grandfather had been a small gravel road that went straight up and down when he was little. He said people would put a big rock in their cars to jump out and put behind the back tires in the car started going downhill. I thought it was bad enough driving it paved and curvy.

The boys really were exhausted.

The view from the top of Grandfather Mountain.

Four generations.

I was very nervous walking across the swinging bridge carrying Bryson. I kept waiting for him to have a hissy fit.

William and Papa got along really well!

The next morning the kids and I went looking for rocks in the creek at the bottom of the hill below our cabin.

What a clown!

We had fun having a picnic lunch at the cabin afterwards.

I remember Tweetsie Railroad from when I was little. I loved it! It is an amusement park, using the real old train that ran from Elk River to Avery, North Carolina. The train still uses coal to run. The big ride is the train ride around the mountain with the cowboy and Indian show. They also have a country carnival area with rides. The kids loved the ferris wheel. They had never been on one before!

The only hard part of the trip was Papa stopping and talking to everyone. He would literally just leave us and go off talking to people. Mom and I started taking turns going to round him up.

Brianne loved panning for gold again. Mom, Papa, and Bryson stayed and watched a cancan show, while I took Brianne and William to the rides.

The train show was great! We rode the train three times, and every time the show was a little different. The last show, right before the park closed, the Indians came into town and kidnapped one of the cancan girls. The cowboys started fussing and saying how they needed to go save her. Brianne started crying when they got on the train, and said, "Come on, we have to go see if they save her!" We have just gotten off the train. Mom took Brianne and William back on and I waited with Papa this time.

Brianne and William loved the cowboy from our train compartment. They thought he was so funny!

After the last train ride, all of the characters went and did a show together.

On Sunday we went on the genealogy trip. It was amazing! First we drove about 15 minutes from the cabin, and right to where Papa grew up. This house was built by Papa's grandfather, my great-grandfather. Papa's mother went and lived here after Burl, Papa's father passed away. She bought the house, or inherited it, when her parents passed away. Papa said his grand father was not a builder, but he built the whole house himself. Shortly after Papa's mother was killed in a car accident in 1982, someone burned the house. Now it just sits empty. Evidently I stayed here one weekend when I was three years old, and I have a radio and table that came out of this house. Papa said he remembers listening to Big Mama, his grandmother, listen to her shows on the radio.

There is one long road called Elk River Road, wher Papa spent the majority of his life. His stories while going down the road were fascinating. At the beginning of the road was the church he went to and was baptized at.

This was the cave where some of Papa's ancestors hid in when some Indians came and raided the area.

This is where Papa went to elementary school. He said it looked the exact same as he remembered it looking.

Right in the grass right here, Papa and his parents lived in a "bark house" for a while. Papa was born in a small shack about 7 miles further upmountain, right past the falls, but every few years, gradually moved down hill, living on different peoples land.

All that remains of the road leading to the house Papa was born in. I would have loved to walk down there to the house. He said it was about 4 miles down the road.

The Elk River Falls. These are at the end of the road, when the road going to Papa's house was. He said they would come down there and fish, but he said the hike in and out of the mountains was rough. It was just trails and then a gravel drive.

Papa made it back to the falls...talking to everyone as he went.

Mom and I took the kids below to play in the water at the bottom of the falls. That was hard. We literally were passing kids along one at a time across the rocks.

Bryson loved standing in the water and throwing rocks.

William slipped and fell in the freezing water. He did not like that at all.

I like this picture of Bryson with the waterfall behind him.

This was Papa's father's parents house, the Davis'. The farmer who now owned the property would not let us go to see it, so I set in the middle of the road in the car, and took pictures of it with my zoom lenses. I was really aggravated with him. Papa said his family stayed with the grandparents at this house during the flood in 1940.

While there, we went to the nursing home to seel Herly Davis, Papa's uncle. Herly is his father's brother. He is the last remaining relative from that generation. Papa had not seen him since when his mother died in 1982, and he was shocked at how he looked.

This is the creek right next to the church where Papa was baptized. He said they dammed the creek up and he was about 12 years old.

The morning we were getting ready to leave.

This trip has been talked about for years and never done. Papa took us there when I was three years old, but of course I do not remember it, and Mom had never seen everything either. It was fascinating seeing and listening to all of Papa's memories. It is not difficult to get him to talk and every second he was telling another story or piece of history.

The kids were great, considering they were in the car for about 1,000 miles in three days. They had a great time at Tweetsie, swimming in the pool at the resort, and playing in the falls.

I loved everything too, and especially loved hearing the stories that only Papa could pass down. It was neat seeing places I had heard about too. Papa and I just wish we had had some more time.