Have you ever noticed how some people put a spin on their lives when posting on facebook? For example, their spouse could make them a bowl of Ramen noodles and they will post, "My true love made me a candlelight dinner." Well, I decided to follow their example with our recent vacation.
After months of planning, our family left on a camping wilderness retreat into the mountains of Tennessee. Aaron planned and packed what we needed and we spent the night before loading it into our van. On Friday, we loaded the boys into the van and hit the road! We stopped a few exits down from our house for breakfast and a fuel stop during which we decided we missed home already and turned around to drive by our house one last time. Luckily, Joey had forgotten his blanket! Once we made it back to the house, we decided it would make our family vacation even more fun if we took multiple cars and created a caravan to get to Tennessee. After all, two cars mean we get to spend some individualized time with our boys- double the fun and double the gas! Thank goodness our van's engine started to smoke as we pulled into the driveway. Otherwise, our friends and family would have thought we were being too extravegant by taking two cars on vacation!
Can you imagine how excited we were to pull up to our campsite in the rain? Aaron and I were so blessed to be able to show the boys the important life skill of setting up a camp in the rain. Of course, we set up the awning first so they could have a dry, front row seat to watch their parents ' demonstration. The campground preferred that it's campers cook on brand new grills and facilitated this by not having any dirty, ugly, germ infested grills placed in the campground. This encouraged us to run to Walmart to buy a portable grill to cook on. What a great addition to our camping gear selection! When we returned to the campground, Aaron discovered the rain guard was actually acting as a funnel to create a beautiful water feature INSIDE our tent. How blessed were we?!!! Of course, the RV campers immediately became jealous. I felt staying in such a beautiful tent set up would give the children a "entitled" attitude and we were feeling guilty not adding to the city's economic well being so we instead challenged ourselves to beat the world record in tearing down a campsite. That completed we set off to find a hotel for the night. How fortunate that we picked the weekend of a huge baseball tournament to come to town? The hotel we found a room in was amazing! It was apparent customer safety was a priority to the management, because they had installed a security fence-complete with barbwire- to give the customer a warm fuzzy feeling as they entered the building. Did we mention the clearly marked prices gave our boys a chance to improve their math skills? (# of customers x price of the room x # of hours + tax= ?) Aaron and I chose the hotel to complete the boy's survival training. We congratulated the boys with pizza at a wonderful pizza joint and showers and sleep completed our magical first day!
We decided to start day 2 with a hearty breakfast at a cracker barrel where our waitress was running hard. She didn't even have time to bring me coffee until the end of the meal. I was glad the boys got to see such top notch service. Afterward, we went to Ruby Falls. I am a bit claustrophobic, but the pink eye I woke up with really helped confuse my depth perception and the burning distracted me from my fear of being buried alive. Our head full of life lessons and beautiful memories, we came home a day early. We plan on spending the rest of the weekend recovering-I mean, relaxing as we relive the wonderful family togetherness in our minds.
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