and we're off again...

Brett and I have been back home from Hawaii for 2 weeks as of right now. Next Thursday we will be off to a new destination... This destination however is unknown to me. Brett has planned a surprise vacation! again. He did this for me last year and is going to continue the tradition. You see, Brett can't take vacations in the summer because that's his busiest time of the year and this is why we started the "secret vacation". Brett decided he wanted to go somewhere last year and when he decided he asked if I wanted to know where we were going. I said well... whatever. because I do love a good surprise. I needed to know what to pack though so he said, "Case it's winter" so i knew it would be cold where we were going. I even drove for about 2 hours not knowing where we were going haha. I had a blindfold that i was told to wear at certain parts of the long drive. And FINALLY he had me open my eyes and we were in Gatlinburg, TN. We stayed in a beautiful cabin that overlooked the Smokey Mountains!

This trip did not start off well though.. We drove 8 or 9 hours to get there and then an hour to find our cabin.. Once we got to the cabin Brett came to my side of the door and took off my blindfold and we were standing in front of our cabin that was called "Together forever" and ya I cried. haha. So we get in a check everything out and it's awesome! Pool table upstairs, two big screens, and my favorite, a hot tub outside on the deck! So we woke up the next day and it was snowing and it was beautiful to see all the cabins with snow on their roof tops. We only had a few slices of turkey and needed to get to town to stock up on food. Since we got to the cabin at night Brett had left the overhead light on in the car. It was dead... yup dead. So i had to go to the neighbors to see if they'd be willing to jump the car for us... ya not a good start to the vacation. I knocked and a very nice older couple came to the door and were more than happy to help. So we got the car running! Then we had to venture down a very, very, i mean very, steep hill. (we are on a mountain) Since we had come in at night Brett couldn't remember how to get back to the main road and I had a blindfold on at the time so I was no help! haha. It is still snowing and we are just sliding everywhere. We couldn't figure out how to get out so we just had to park our car at the bottom of the very steep hill we came down and walk up. Still with hardly any food at all.
The next day when we woke up it was STILL snowing.. There was about 6 inches of snow on the ground which is a lot when you're on a mountain top! So still no food and I'm getting grouchy.. The very nice old woman came over and asked if we had any food and if we didn't she'd bring us something over. I immediately jumped on that offer! She gave us two sack fulls of all different kinds of food!!! We went over later that day to thank them again and ended up sitting in their cabin talking to them for a couple hours. They were so very nice. So Brett and I played a lot of pool and sat in the hot tub as it continued to snow. It finally heated up to about 50 degrees on the 4th day we were there and we got to go to town and get a cheeseburger! We were so happy to get out of there! The rest of our trip was all uphill from there and we had a great time!

Here we are at Cade's cove to look at the mountain range.





That trip was amazing and we're doing it again this year! Not to the smokey mountains but to a new secret place! Brett did slip and tell me we were flying! I hope it's not as long as the flight to Hawaii! And you know it, I'll be bloggin' as soon as we get to our destination! We leave on Thursday the 11th and won't come home until the 21st!! Oh goodness!