Berries in the Smokeys

Today we finally got around to taking the one hour drive to get to the Smokey Mountains. The mountains were indeed smokey:


(those blurry spots are insects)



Other minor highlights (for major highlight, see below):
1) The woods were nice and had lots of flowers:



2) We had a picnic in a lovely meadow (though there were a lot of insects who wanted to share our salad):


3) We got our feet wet in the (frigid!) waters of a charming stream;


Now for the major highlight. As soon as we started our hike (along the Forney Ridge trail coming down from Clingmans Dome), we encountered bountiful bushes of very sweet and juicy raspberries. Gina put the first four in her mouth before I could even take the picture:



Further down the trail, we found blackberries and blueberries (all equally sweet):



Although we did hike a bit and have that picnic I talked about, Gina's heart was in the picking of berries (the meadow--site of our picnic--was the "headquarters" (as Gina puts it) of the blueberry trees). Back at home, here's a couple photos of our spoils:


(FYI: that's the edge of my purple bean bag on the bottom of the picture)