The Great Smokey Mountains (craziness #3)

From that week into this....

 A family trip to Tennessee. Brian's aunt and uncle invite a bunch of family members to a cabin in TN. We did this two years ago and it was great, crazy fun. It was the same this year. However, this time Brian stayed home. My sister-in-law and I traveled together:

10 hour drive split into 2 days
5 kids: ages 6, 5, 3, 1, and 8 mo.
1 I-pod touch with games to fight over. 
1 broken DVD player (seriously!?!! We only got to play 1 dvd before it stopped working)
lots of audio books but our crowd just couldn't calm down long enough to pay any attention.
(so actually, the driving went really well. The kids were pretty good. Just a bit loud sometimes and just a few fights.)

Once we got there we now had:

12 children (oldest is soon to be 13.)
7 adults (2 years ago we had 9 adults.)

What did we do?

Caverns (on the way down):

Swimming, hotel fun, general traveling fun:

-Cherokee Indian Village: learning about the Indians from the Indians themselves (this is actually in North Carolina)

 -Santa Land: (mot my favorite place but the kids love it.)

(Tristan did the classic scream when we got close to santa. But we had a technical error and didn't catch it on camera.)

-Swimming in the River. (We love, love, love this river! So fun!) Tristan loved it so much too. I don't have any pictures of him because I left my camera in the car and haven't gotten pictures from my mother-in-law yet.

-Cades Cove: (which will work out better when our kids are older. It was so dang hot too, we stayed in the car most of the time.) Its basically a mountain with a 1-way loop you drive one. you can get out at about 13 stops to see old cabins, churches, to learn about the first people who settled Cades Cove. There are a few hiking trails and I was told a great trail to some falls but we didn't go on it. We saw a deer up close and there was also a bear in a tree but we Heather and I vaguely saw the bear- we drove by it and thought it was an eagle's nest. I would like to do Cades Cover another year and get more out of it next time. It was very pretty though. Lots of mountains and lots of valleys.

-Hot tub fun, playing cards with cousins, and just playing at the cabin

-White Water Rafting (dang, don't have pictures at the moment.) Rafting was fun but not as fun as the other year. The river was lower this time plus we had to go on the low end because of all the kids we had. (You have to be 8 to go on the higher end which has a greater degree of intensity.) The rapids we went on only had about a level 2 (maybe 1 or 2 level 3) out of 5 level scoring scale.