Top Family Destination: Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Here's the big news: You and your family can actually find peace and solitude in America's most-visited park. With some 520,000 acres, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, is one big, welcoming tent. You and your family can cocoon yourselves in true wilderness, hike a trail in utter silence, and camp out in the hush of a hardwood forest -- all in spite of the fact that the Great Smoky National Park is visited by eight to 10 million people a year.

Yes, if you visit in the summer high season you will at times feel like a salmon on a spawning run, with Grand Caravans clogging the roads and Dolly Parton theme parks dialing up the cornpone. This is America, unvarnished and unabashed, making pilgrimages into celestial surrounds. Join your brethren and head to the park's highest peak, Clingman's Dome, soaring to 6,600 feet above sea level. Angle for fish in trout-rich streams, lakes, and rivers. Reach out and touch the stars on a blue-black night in one of the park's 10 developed campgrounds.

Even in the busiest seasons, however, true beauty is all around, from the sweeping curves of the Blue Ridge Highway to the sparkle of the sun on a burbling mountain stream. Climb the spiraling roads by car or put your two feet on the ground and hit the leaf-strewn Appalachian Trail. Carolina pines scent the air, and scarlet rhododendrons dot the hills. Listen to the concert of leaves fluttering in the breeze. You will be doing what untold folks have done before you -- from Cherokee warriors to coonskin-clad pioneers -- and it will feel fresh and new. And when the swirling silver mist crowns the mossy peaks, you'll understand why these smoky heights continue to fascinate, as they have for untold centuries.

Alexis Lipsitz Flippin is the author of multiple Caribbean guidebooks and the forthcoming New York City Day by Day.