Traveling Huntleys

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

Waterfalls

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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Blue Ridge Parkway, Skyline & Shenandoah

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Last Updated: July 3, 2026

The Blue Ridge Parkway is part of the National Park Service and links Shenandoah National Park to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The Blue Ridge Parkway is 469 miles long and continues through Shenandoah as Skyline Drive for another 105 miles. This leg of our 2019 fall road trip took us through some of the most spectacular autumn scenery in the eastern United States.

Tree-lined road in peak fall foliage on the Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina
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