What I Packed for Our Great Smoky Mountains Trip in March

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In March, we traveled to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park over spring break. The weather while we were there ranged from the 20s at the beginning to the 70s by the time we left. This meant that I had to pack lots of layers. We’ve been to cold places before and lots of warm places, but with this trip I was challenged to pack for all of it while trying not to pack too much. My approach was neutral color layers so I could mix and match.

In this post, I go through my process for packing, some of the key items I packed for us, and outfit inspiration through some of our pictures. 

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. That means if you click on a link and make a purchase I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.

My Process for Packing

I have 3 boys that are ages 7, 6, and 3. And when I pack us up for a trip, I have three main steps:

Lay the clothes out: I like to lay everything out first and line it up in order of what day they or I will be wearing it. Visually being able to see it helps me a lot. Sometimes a pair of shorts I need for one of my kids might be in the wash, so quickly being able to see that it is missing helps to make sure I don’t forget it. This is what it looked like once I had everything laid out.

Pack into packing cubes: Once everything is planned out, I pack everything into packing cubes. Each kid has their own color, so I easily know which cubes are for which of my kids. I recently bought the Go Skoot packing cubes, so I did not have them for our spring break trip. But they are now my favorite packing cubes.

The colors are so cute and fun, they come with labels, they are a set of 4, and they are a waterproof material (for our Disney cruise, I stuffed all of our wet stuff into the bag from the set and it worked perfect).

For myself, I use these packing cubes. Now that I have the cute colored ones from Go Skoot for the boys though, I really want a pretty color for me! But these ones work really well.

Put into a large suitcase: My preference for suitcases is to use one large suitcase that all the boys packing cubes can fit into. And then I use a second large suitcase for mine and my husband’s items. We have a hard sided suitcase today that works great. My goal when traveling, especially flying, is to have as few suitcases as possible. But it does mean I check them and I’m ok with that.

Items I Packed

Overall Items:

Airplane & Car Items:

For the kids:

  • Hiking shoes – We loved these ones
  • Neutral/solid color sweaters from Target (Cat & Jack) that were perfect for layering and mixing and matching
  • Jackets – All of their jackets are hand me downs and were lightweight jackets. So, when it was really cold I just added layers underneath
  • Long underwear – I didn’t want to invest too much in warm hiking pants because they wouldn’t get used that much by us. So instead, I found this long underwear on Amazon and layered it underneath their regular pants
  • Gloves – I don’t want to invest too much in gloves since we don’t wear them often so these worked great for us
  • Hats
  • Pajamas – I always buy the kids a matching set of pajamas for our family trips that go along with what the trip is, so for the cruise I bought these “tiny traveler” pajamas from Fletch. They are so cute and the material is so soft. My boys loved them.
  • Bathing suits – They swam a lot at the hotels

For Me:

  • Jacket – I bought this jacket for our trip and I loved it! I love that it is two jackets in one if you need to separate them. My trip was cold, so I liked it all together as one. I never got cold with this jacket and liked it because it was longer.
  • Hiking Boots – Unfortunately, my hiking boots are no longer available from Merrell. But these ones are very similar to mine and have great reviews.
  • Smoky Mountains National Park tee and a National Parks tee from Mountain Moverz
  • Warm socks

Outfit Inspiration

Below are some pictures from our trip to help get an idea of what we packed. Packing for this trip was a learning experience for me since we are used to tropical.

  • My Jacket
  • My Boots – Merrell no longer carries my boots but these ones are very similar and has great reviews
  • My Shirt –  This is from Nordstrom a few years ago so no longer available. Here is a cute neutral one on sale
  • Boys shoes 
  • My husbands boots
  • Boys sweatshirts – Cat & Jack from Target