Anniversary Trip

Like I said in the last post, this week was our 10 year anniversary! Man, we are getting old! AJ planned a trip to Gatlinburg this week for just the two of us.

Wednesday was the day we were leaving. First we had to go to Sam's school to say goodbye to his teacher and to pick up his report card. He did great this year! Almost every report card had all E's and many of them were E+'s. E is the highest grade you can get for those of you that have different grading systems. ;) He learned so much, had lots of friends, loved his teacher, and did lots of new things. He is reading the 5th Harry Potter book, which had like 900 pages. I attribute that to his teacher last year, she really emphasized reading and taught him well, AND to his teacher this year who gave them LOTS of time to read. I am so glad he loves reading and loves school. Thank you to the 2 best teachers in the world!!! We love you Mrs. Tarpley and Mrs. Gunder! :)


After that we packed all up and took the kids to Lindsay's house. It seems like we took their whole bedrooms with them! LOL! They were excited to stay there and had been waiting all week. We then went to get tires on the car. AJ is worried about them because they were very bad and he didn't want to drive all that way on terrible tires, especially since it was raining when we left. It ended up that we went to 4 different places looking for the right tire at the right price. We ended up not leaving until 4 hours later! Oh well, we weren't in a hurry or anything. We played like 8 games of the ABC game on the way to Knoxville with me winning each and every one of course. :P Here is what we saw on our way in to Knoxville.



Do you think that is a good sign for our next 10 years of marriage?! It was the hugest, fullest, brightest rainbow I had ever seen!

****Disclaimer****
I did not take my good, nice, expensive camera with us, and so far I am not too happy with the new, cheap camera I got for Mother's Day. So bare with the bad quality pictures. Also, I am so used to my big camera, with all the knobs, settings, etc. that I am still trying to get used to just pointing and shooting, which also makes for bad pictures. LOL!
******************

Our cabin was in the Smoky Mountains. It was so nice! To get to it we had to drive up the mountain, turn on to Boogertown Rd. (I had to throw that in there because AJ, of course, thought that was the funniest thing and mentioned it each time we came to that road. Boys will be boys after all.....) and then turn onto tiny little one lane roads, well barely roads, more like pathways through the trees. I hated that part of our drive every time. Here is our cabin! You have to click the link because I didn't take pictures of it, since I knew there were already good ones on the website. It was so nice and quite. I recommend staying there if you ever go to Gatlinburg. It was very close to Dollywood/Pigeon Forge and took no time at all to get there. That night we sat in the Hot Tub, more AJ's thing than mine. I only like it for about 10 minutes before I get too hot and bored. :) Then we played Scrabble and went to bed really late.

The next day, I got up about 11:00, AJ at 12:00. We got ready for the day and then sat there forever trying to decide what to do. You can tell I didn't plan this trip! :P We ended up going to WonderWorks. It was a cool looking, upside down building. Inside they had lots of cool exhibits like a rock wall, what it feels like in an earthquake, how to fly an airplane, a bed of nails you could lay on (AJ did that, I did not), etc. Just a cool place, filled with lots of neat stuff. My favorite part of that was feeling what it was like in the water when the Titanic sank. That water was FREEZING. You had to see how long you could hold your hand in it. AJ did like 23 seconds I think, and I think I did 34. It HURT and was terrible. I can't imagine your whole body being in that water . We couldn't even handle 30 seconds! It even hurt my bones. I am sure AJ's favorite part was laser tag. It was a neat place, not as cool as I expected it to be, but cool enough. Our favorite part of that though, was the dinner show. It was a really good show. Not the stupid, country humor that we have seen before, but just genuinely funny and good. AND they served italian food, instead of BBQ and ribs! It was yummy and a great show. We DEFINITELY recommend that part of Wonderworks! After all our play time we went to Wal-mart, we needed milk, and then went and rode Go-karts. A must-do in Gatlinburg. Then we went and got ice cream and went back to the cabin about 11:00. I opted out of the hot tub that night and fell asleep while waiting for AJ to get out of it.

The next day we went to Splash Country, which is a water park adjacent to Dollywood. It was the perfect day for it. It was hot, but not too hot to wait in lines, etc, and it wasn't very busy at all. We rarely had to wait any time at all. The longest line we waited in was for lunch! When we got there I sprayed on of my arms with sunscreen and then AJ took over on my back, etc. Well, neither of us did my other arm! We didn't realize it for quite a long time, so I have one burned arm. Thankfully it still wasn't that bad, I really don't burn, and I only have a small circle that hurts a little bit. We spent a lot of time in the Lazy River and rode lots of water slides. We stayed about 6 hours and it was fun. When we came out there was a note on our car. I thought someone had hit our car or something and left a note, but no, it was addressed to us! It was some friends of ours that had lived here in Smyrna that we went to church with a few years ago. Somehow they figured out it was our car and wrote us a note! They had moved away, to Texas, I think like 4 years ago maybe. Anyway, they happened to be living in Knoxville, happened to come to Splash Country on that day, and happened to park right next to us! How weird is that!! We never even saw them inside the park! It was very strange and cool! I had sung a duet in church with the Dad before they left. Funny! We ended up writing them a note back, but never did see them. After Splash Country we went back to the cabin, got all dressed up, and went to eat dinner at a super nice restaurant, The Peddler, for our Anniversary. We had a table that looked out right on a river. It was nice. The food tasted the same to me as any other food, and I would have been fine going to a regular old restaurant and spending way less money, but AJ had a gift card and wanted to do something extra nice for our 10 year anniversary. :)

The next day it was time to go. We left the cabin and went to eat lunch before leaving Knoxville. The drive back seemed extra long and boring. We got back and picked up the kids, who were happy to see us. They had fun, but of course, missed their Mommy. :) They were pretty good. Sam and Lindsay had some arguing incidents (what can I say, he is my child) and Avery had a hard time sleeping there so there was some too tired boy incidents, but I think overall it went well. She may say differently. :) Her kids were sick the entire time with high fevers, headaches, and sore throats. She ended up taking them to the doctor, but don't know results of their labs yet. They still did lots of fun things and enjoyed playing together for the most part though. Avery got the fever last night and is not feeling well at all today. His temp a little while ago was 103.4. Poor kids! Last night, before we realized Avery was sick, we took them to see Indiana Jones. It was ok, none of us loved it. There was also quite a bit of language, which we of course, did not like. We went to eat dinner and had promised the boys new Webkinz if they were good with Lindsay. Sam got the dragon and Avery got a furry, brown dog.

Avery and I stayed home from church today. While I was gone my eyes really started bothering me (allergies) at Splash Country. Each day it got worse and worse and now I think I have an infection in one eye and one starting in the other. Underneath my eye is so swollen and red, and it HURTS. I look terrible. Here's a gross pic, and this doesn't even look as bad as it did last night!


Tomorrow is busy! I hope I look better and I hope Avery feels better! I have a Doctor appt in the morning, we may have to fit one in for Avery after that, and then in the afternoon Sam has a pre-surgery appt. at the hospital. His surgery is supposed to be Friday. Hopefully he won't get this sickness and everything can go as planned.

Here is a picture of us after being married for 10 years!



And here is what a typical day with us would look like, me being normal and AJ being a dork! ;p