Our Family Vacation-long over due!

Well, the vaacation was well over due as the post is also! This is what hapens when you have a family to care for, blogs suffer! :)

Since Jacob has been gone for most of this year, we decided to save some money and take a family vacation to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. This is the first vacation we have taken as a family -any other traveling we have done was to visit other family members. It was so nice to get away just US. we love our families but the time has come to spend time together!

We rented a cabin at Timbertops Cabin Rentals. These are very nice cabins! We had 2 bedrooms, each with a King size bed (which i actually do NOT prefer-since i can never find my sweetie in the night!), front and back porches, pool table, jacuzzi tub on the back porch and a spa tub inside. 2 separate full bathrooms, full kitchen, and laundry.

We arrived on Tuesday night, so we didn't do much! The next day we went to the indoor pool of the resort, and then took a ride around town. We stopped for some fun activities for the kids. A small play park, which you have to buy tickets for, but we made all the tickets last over 2 hours-so all in all not bad. The kids had fun!

CLAYTON LOVES GO-CARTS!!!!!!! CANDICE HATES GO-CARTS!!!!
Miniature Golf--Or PUTT PUTT as it is called in the South!

This was Cameron's 1st time on a Miracle Round-as Candice calls it!

The next day we went to DollyWood! This was a FUN day for all! Its ALOT of walking, but noone complained! It was AWESOME, cuz as we were walking in to get in line for tickets I saw a table that said "FREE KODAK CAMERA". Of course "FREE" caught my eye, and i had to ask what this was all about. I figured they were giving away free throw away cameras or something. you know something with a BIG catch. well as i talk to the ladies, i find out that they are giving away a free Kodak Easy Share Camera with a 2GB memory card. The catch: you have to have a family who has not been to Pigeon forge for Vacation, have children, adn staying 3+ nights. We meet all the requirements. She proceeds to tell me that all they ask us to do is to photojournalize our vacation-take apicture of every activity we do while there. then fill out the survey paper, write on the back of postcards, and make a 60 second commercial about what we enjoyed the most. (i am thinking to myself-oh this will be a fun little thing for us to do-and we get to keepa camera-COOL!) So then she tells me, we have to mail all the papers back adn the pictures-which they will give back to us-and then they will call me for a phone interview. After the interview, they will mail a check for $150 for our participation! I said "excuse me, we get money to do this?" she said YES! (By now, inside i am thinking--woohoo, glad i stopped! and We got the LAST one they were handing out!) So we got all our stuff and went to buy our tickets to get into Dollywood. We told th ekids we coudl go to Splash Country too, but that was gonna cost us over $500 and we found out that the regular park had a splash pad and water rides in one section. So we just bought the regular park tickets. Guess how much it was? $150---now i was completely thrilled, because that check we will get for our participation will cover the cost of Dollywood! (BTW: the kids still think we went to Splash Country because they got all wet on rides!) It was a fun, but exhausting day! one of my favorite things there is watching the glass makers! it is fascinating!

Then the next day we went to the Outlets shopping. didn't buy too much, got Clayton his soccer gear fairly inexpensively. I got a pair of shoes...nothing too exciting. The last day we were there, we stopped at a Kincaid Gallery. We have always wanted a nice painting for the house, so while we were in there we found this BEAUTIFUL painting by Mark Keathley. We decided to finally get one! It is absolutely beautiful and it matches the color in our house perfectly!
In between the activities I listed and posted pictures of, we did do other things, but it would take FOREVER to upload it all. You can see the complete vacation in pictures on my FACEBOOK page (facebook.com/metcalf6). It was a great vacation! We hope to be able to go on vacation again sometime in the next few years! I do recommend this vacation spot for anyone-especially if you live with 3 hours like we do--the total cost of our trip was VERY inexpensive!