Traveling Huntleys

Inspiring travel stories, tips, and guides from a couple exploring the world one destination at a time.

Jake the Dog

Mammoth Cave & Cumberland Falls, Kentucky: The World’s Longest Cave and the Only Moonbow in the Hemisphere

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Last Updated: August 3, 2026

Kentucky gave us two stops that have almost nothing in common except that both are underrated. Cumberland Falls throws a moonbow — a lunar rainbow — on clear nights around the full moon, and it is one of only two places on earth where that happens on a predictable schedule. Mammoth Cave is the longest cave system in the world by a very wide margin, and it is still getting longer every year as surveyors push further into it. Between the two of them we found the original Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Stonehenge in somebody’s front yard. From Pigeon Forge it was a straightforward run north.

Inside Mammoth Cave National Park on a walking path with a flat ceiling, Kentucky
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Pigeon Forge & the Great Smoky Mountains, Tennessee: Waterfalls, Mingus Mill and Snow in April

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Last Updated: August 3, 2026

Pigeon Forge is a year-round tourist town in the western foothills of the Smoky Mountains — shows, shopping, bars, restaurants, go-karts, hiking, watersports, and the mountains themselves. There are simply too many things to see and do in a week. It is also the front door to the most visited national park in the United States, which is the reason we came, and the strip out front turns out to be a genuinely useful thing to have when the weather in the park goes sideways.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park with low clouds, Tennessee
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Edisto Beach & Lake Greenwood, South Carolina: Shelling, Dark Skies and a 4,000-Year-Old Shell Mound

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Last Updated: August 3, 2026

Edisto Beach sits about an hour south of Charleston at the end of Highway 174, a two-lane road that simply runs out of island and stops at the Atlantic. That dead end is the whole reason the place is still quiet. Fewer than a thousand people live in the town year-round, there is no high-rise and no boardwalk, and the main attraction is a beach so thick with shells you can hear them clatter in the wash. Low tourism, low industry, and miles of sand to walk was exactly what we were after. From Hanna Park in Jacksonville it was a four-hour drive north.

Sandy Huntley walking looking at sea shells on Edisto Beach, South Carolina
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Hanna Park, Jacksonville, Florida: Oceanfront Camping, Boneyard Beach & the Historian Behind the Name

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Last Updated: August 2, 2026

Hanna Park is about 450 acres of mature coastal hammock at Mayport, in the Jacksonville Beaches area of northeast Florida. Its full name is Kathryn Abbey Hanna Park, and the name is worth pausing on rather than skimming past — more on her in a moment. Winthrop Bancroft donated the first five oceanfront acres to the City of Jacksonville in 1967 on the condition that the park carry her name; the city bought up adjoining land and the park opened in 1972.

Wide Atlantic beach and surf at Kathryn Abbey Hanna Park, Jacksonville, Florida
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White Springs, Florida: The Suwannee River, a Sacred Spring & Florida’s First Tourist Town

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Last Updated: August 2, 2026

White Springs grew up around a sulphur spring, and the spring has a longer history than the town. The Suwannee River here was the boundary between the territory of the Timucua to the east and the Apalachee to the west, and the spring on its bank was regarded as sacred healing ground — neutral territory where even nations at war observed a truce in order to bathe in it. Spanish explorers recorded the custom. Later the Americans built on it: Bryant Sheffield put up a hotel and a spring house in 1836, a multi-storey bathhouse followed, and White Springs became, by most accounts, Florida’s first tourist attraction. The town was a refuge during the Civil War. The spring eventually stopped flowing — by around 1990 it was finished — and the surrounding country never developed the way the rest of Florida did. What is left is the river, and the quiet.

The tea-colored Suwannee River running between wooded banks near White Springs, Florida
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Nation’s Oldest City: St. Augustine, Florida — Spanish Roots, Pirate Treasure & the Dade Pyramids

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Last Updated: August 2, 2026

St. Augustine is called the Nation’s Oldest City, and the claim holds up with one careful qualification. Founded in 1565 by the Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, it is the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in the mainland United States. San Juan, Puerto Rico is older still, founded in 1521. Either way, St. Augustine was already two generations old when the English landed at Jamestown. Spain ceded Florida to the United States under the Adams-Onís Treaty, signed in 1819 and taking effect in 1821; St. Augustine served as capital of the Florida Territory until 1824, when the seat of government moved to Tallahassee — chosen, sensibly enough, as the midpoint between here and Pensacola.

Sandy Huntley walking Jake the dog along the sand at St. Augustine Beach, Florida
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