Memorial Day in Tennessee

We went on a fun, relaxing, inexpensive, last-minute Memorial Day weekend vacation to Gatlinburg, Tennessee with our friends Dustin and Meredith. It was fun. For those of you who haven't heard of Gatlinburg, it's about 4 or 5 hours south of us in the Smoky Mountains, and it's pretty much the same as Branson, Missouri. For those who haven't heard of Branson, it's just a tourist area with a lot of shows and amusement that has a hillbilly style to it. Anyway, we stayed in a decent condo with a really good view. It was kind of far away from all of the food and entertainment, but with our little Civic Hybrid, we're not even really feeling the high gas prices, so it wasn't so bad.

A funny thing happened when we first got there. We put the address to the condo in our GPS, and we arrived late at night. We saw the sign for the place, but our GPS was telling us to turn on a different road. We decided to trust it, and turn on the road it told us to. Well, we drove a little bit and realized that we were driving across a golf course on a golf cart path. It was pretty hilarious. We went to a few Ripley's attractions in Gatlinburg on the first day. We bought a 3 ticket package deal to go to Ripley's Believe it or Not, Ripley's Aquarium, and a Ripley's Haunted House. I think we all agreed that the Aquarium was the coolest...which makes sense because they charged the most for it. We ran into some of Brock's cousins at the Aquarium who were also on vacation from Indiana. While we were there, they were having a diving show, so we sat down on a bench to wait a few minutes before it started. The room was dark and there was loud music playing, so Dustin and Brock started singing along really loud and high with the music because they thought that they could blend their voices with the song so that no one knew they were singing along. It sounded pretty loud to me, so I don't know if other people could hear it or not. It was so funny. I'm going to post a video of it, but I don't know if it portrays how funny it really was. I think it was just Brock singing when I had the camera on.

On the second day we floated down a river. We payed $8 each and they gave us a tube and dropped us off a couple miles upstream. We picked out tubes and put them in the back of the van, but when we got out, they all got mixed up, so Brock ended up with a smaller tube and Dustin ended up with a tube that had a million patches on the bottom. Needless to say, Brock didn't enjoy the first half of the trip (until I switched tubes with him) and Dustin didn't have any air left in his tube by the end of the trip. I think we still had a good time though.

On the last day we went to Pigeon Forge where we rode go-carts, and played miniature golf. I was reminded of how bad I am at miniature golf. It was embarrassing. It was a really fun trip! We laughed a ton. We're glad that Dustin and Meredith suggested the trip, and that I finally decided to go. (I didn't want to at first because I felt bad about not doing my job as a primary chorister 2 weeks in a row, but I decided to be irresponsible for a week.) Here are some pictures.

This is the golf course we accidentally drove through. The view from our condo balcony. The place where we stayed. Meredith thought I needed a picture of it for my blog. :)



For those of you who think we're dumb for doing whatever our GPS tells us to do even if it tells us to drive across a golf course (Branden!), here's a link to a Google map which shows where went. The street we turned on was Martha McCarter Dr., and we were supposed to be on Butler Branch Rd. I promise we're not like Michael Scott. We use our GPS as well as our brains to get us where we need to be. haha :)