Traveling Huntleys

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

National Parks

Eminence, Missouri: Blue Spring, Alley Mill and the Country’s First Scenic Riverways

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Last Updated: September 3, 2026

Eminence is in the center of the Ozark National Scenic Riverways. It’s one of the nation’s first protected waterways — in fact it was the first of them, established in 1964, four years before the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act existed at all. The park encompasses the Current and Jacks Fork rivers. These rivers are known for their clear, calm and cool water which is ideal for swimming, fishing, paddling and tubing. Eminence is a small town, less than 600 people live here. The post office was established in 1844. We knew this because we needed it to mail our taxes on time.

A rainbow over the Jacks Fork River seen from our RV site in Eminence, Missouri
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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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Dolores, Colorado and Mesa Verde National Park

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Last Updated: July 20, 2026

Dolores is a small but historically rich town tucked into the southwest corner of Colorado at an elevation of about 6,900 feet. Telluride and Durango are roughly an hour’s drive to the east, while Utah’s canyon country begins just to the west. What makes Dolores such a remarkable base is the sheer concentration of world-class archaeological sites within a short drive — Mesa Verde National Park, Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, and Hovenweep National Monument are all within 30 minutes. We last visited southwestern Colorado about two years earlier in the spring, and returning in fall revealed a completely different side of this landscape. The area is steeped in the culture of the Ancestral Puebloans — known historically as the Anasazi — who built some of North America’s most extraordinary stone dwellings here centuries ago.

Ancient stone ruins at Canyons of the Ancients National Monument near Dolores, Colorado, with walls of hand-laid sandstone blocks still standing after nearly a thousand years
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