The Great Smoky Mountains!

Hello friends and family! Lee and I and the kids of course all took a vacation at the end of March: to the Smoky Mountains! We were gone for 4 and 1/2 days, and it was a blast! The drive was 11 hours-ish, but the kids took it well (thanks to movies in the car, and lots of primary songs). We made it to our cabin on Thursday afternoon, and took these pictures immediately. Don't they look happy to be out of the car?

     

Next day, we went to see the Mountains themselves. The kids slept most of the time, but we got some great pictures. Here are a few:

That night, we went to a boot store that Lee saw when we rolled into Gatlinburg. The sign said "Buy one, get two free!" Who could resist that? There's a lot of outlet shopping up in that area, so you can all guess what my favorite vacation activity was :)  We had a lot of fun at the boot store. While I'm not a boot-scooter myself, Elaina loves boots because her Daddy wears them. She found these red boots and fell in love:

No I did not buy myself red boots, but yes, we did get Elaina's. Here's another pic from our boot store adventure. Don't laugh too hard. Lee made me....

In the end we all got a pair of boots. For some reason I don't have a picture of all of them together, but I will soon. What a fun day!

Saturday, we stayed in our cabin for the first half of the day, because of some rainy weather. After naptime though, things cleared up and we went to Pigeon Forge to do some shop-hopping. They have so many little gift shops, it's amazing. Even I was overwhelmed with all the retail! First off we went to the Aquarium. I thought the Smoky's were a strange place for an aquarium, but apparently the whole area was once covered with water, so there's an aquarium now to immortalize that piece of history. Here's the pics:

Lee had the camera, so there's a lot of McKay in those pictures. He's kinda cute though, so it's okay. After the Aquarium, we got some lunch and ice cream, then went shopping! Here's some pictures of that:

Then we found this store: The Clock Peddler. Lee and I have been talking about getting a large clock since we got married. So we had to look. We ended up getting the clock below. What can I say? There are some really good deals in Gatlinburg!

So after we bought our big clock, we couldn't shop very easily anymore, what with walking with a huge box under our arm. So we headed back to our cabin for our last night. Sunday, we went to church somewhere on the way home, and drove all day long. Elaina loves singing primary songs, and she got to learn some new ones in the car. Here's a video of her singing:
http://youtu.be/46E7ZDYGqLk

And a video of Elaina and McKay playing air hockey in the cabin:
http://youtu.be/Wcjl1X-3Yhg

What a fun trip! The only thing that would have made it better is if we could have had all our family with us too. We miss you all!