The true story of Sabine & Ulf from Germany and how we ended up with a beautiful vacation home in the Western North Carolina Smoky Mountains.
A friend of us kept talking about his vacations in the Great Smoky Mountains. After listening many times to all the interesting stories and beautiful descriptions, we thought it might be worth while to do some research and see if it might be something we should do too.
After browsing through hundreds of pages on the web, we decided to include a visit to the Smokys for our next vacation.
For 2016 we scheduled a long vacation (4 weeks), to do an extensive trip to the USA. 2 of those 4 weeks were reserved for the Smoky Mountains where we had rented a house.
We started off in Miami on 2nd of May 2016, spent a week in Florida to enjoy the beach, visit the Keys and meet some friends in Ft. Lauderdale.
Then we drove up north to Savannah, spent a couple of days there to walk through the beautiful parks and the scenery of „Midnight in the garden of good and evil“.
Finally on the 10th of May we arrived late in the evening at the house we had rented in the Smokys. What a difference to what we had seen so far! So much space, fresh mountain air and utmost peace. We sleped deep and peaceful like never before and woke up so relaxed and refreshed.
This first day we explored the surrounding area, did some hiking and enjoyed preparing dinner together and eating outside in the tranquil nature. No stress, no noise, no hassle. The evening in front of the fireplace with a good glas of wine was the perfect finish for a perfect day.
We went to bed this day so happy, satisfied and relaxed that we already realized this must be the closest place to heaven we could think off.
The next day we went to this cosy little town 10 minutes away from the house, Bryson City, to stroll through the streets with all the cafes, restaurants and shops. How beautiful! By coincidence we passed by a local real estate company, not knowing at that time how that would change our life.
Two days later the local real estate agent took us to look at some properties in the area around Bryson City and another two days later we knew that this is it! We fell in love at first sight, with the area, with the people, with the piece of land we found and decided to take the chance and buy the property.
For the rest of the two weeks we discovered more of this beautiful area, met some great people and enjoyed life. Then we continued our journey, went to Washington DC for a couple days of site seeing and the remaining 5 days in New York for more site seeing and shopping. At the end both of us said that 2 days New York and rather 3 more days in the Smokys would have been better.
We flew back to Germany knowing, that a beautiful journey just ended but the most exciting journey being now in front of us… planning and building our dream mountain retreat from 4200mls away.
And as you can see, we succeeded 😊