GSM is a great choice! There are a few mountain-side tunnels you have to drive through in the park, very short, maybe 50 yards at most. Hope your daughter is okay with that.
Shame about the caves. I know it probably won’t help comfort her, but more people are going to die in car wrecks in Indiana today than have ever died from cave-ins at Mammoth cave.
Clingman’s dome at GSM is (or was) the highest point in the Appalachian mountains. Def visit in the evening if you want amazing views. Cades Cove usually has bears and is a driveable trail. We saw 2 bears and a bear cub, plus some deer and Elk on the drive.
I saw in another post that your fam like aquariums, there is the Ripley’s aquarium in Gatlingburg, which was a little expensive IMHO, but it is a decent aquarium.
Skybridge is a ton of fun, but very touristy.
There is a little GSM trail at the edge of Gatlinburg that my wife and I walked at night. We frequently do this in parks. Bring red lights to preserve your night vision, and a black light because there are tons of centipedes that glow a ghostly blue when hit with a blacklight. We also blinded the shit out of a few mice. Try not to do that…
Also, depending on the time of year, do some road cruising in the morning or early evening. You’ll see lots of wild turkeys, deer, and snakes. Please be careful not to run over the snakes.
Stop buying stuff. My wife grew up poor, probably poorer than I did, and she still buys tons of junk. If fucking Amazon is showing up to your house on a weekly basis, STOP, you are buying shit you don’t need.
Don’t buy something because it is on sale. If you don’t want it bad enough to buy it at full price, then you don’t need it. This does not mean ignore sales/discounts, but don’t let fear of missing a sale or discount force you to buy something.
Kohl’s is a fucking scam, stay the fuck away from them. All their shit is price jacked 60-80% so they can advertise 40% off, give you “Kohl’s Cash” and still make a profit. The number of times my partner has told me we have to shop for clothes because our $40 dollars of Kohls cash is expiring, and we walk out with $200 dollars of clothes and another 40 in Kohls Cash is way too damn fucking many times.
Apple is expensive junk. Avoid if you can. Fuck it, Windows/Microsoft is expensive junk too. I’m paying 150 a year for office, and I hardly use it. My partner “needs it” because they can’t write a document or use a spreadsheet in Google’s free office suite. The Surface is fucking terrible.
Just stop buying stuff. Try it for a week, don’t buy anything except groceries, and maybe gas if you drive. You’ll survive.
When Republicans were initially investingating the 2020 election in Georgia, they called in a “forensic imaging specialist” who said that they would be able to determine which ballots were fabricated. I got a lot of flack for questioning the guy’s credentials online, but literally his biggest accomplishment in life was inventing a crappy barcode scanner shaped like a cat, and it was a huge flop.
r/conservative was adamant that this dunce was going to overturn the election in Georgia…
Make sure you grab some “I did that” Biden stickers to slap on gas pumps. Really lean in to that “I make poor decisions and blame the wrong person for the consequences” energy.