Karalee's Galtinburg Birthday Weekend

This past 4th of July weekend we packed up the family for a trip to Gatlinburg Tennessee!!  It had been a long time since we have taken a weekend vacation and thought this would be a great opputunity.  The journey started early Saturday morning with blue skies and a full tank of gas.  Karalee had made reservations and a neat hotel with a pool and other splash playgrounds, the Dixie Stampede and the Gatlinburg aquarium.  We were set and Kennick was excited!  We didn't set any land speed records to get there but the car ride was fairly uneventful.  Kennick had been chatty almost the whole trip and entertained with numerous videos of Curious George until he decided to fall asleep about 2 miles from the hotel.  We did the best we could to get checked in and to the room without disturbing him so he could have a good nap.  We made it past the front desk, pool, up a flight of stairs, through the door and just as Karalee was laying him down on the bed he looked over at the both of us and said "I want to go the pool".  His nap lasted about 15 minutes and he wasn't going to go back to sleep anytime soon.

The pool had many different fountains, a slide and buckets that would drop water out of the sky.  This was a lesson that Kennick learned the hard way.  He and Karalee were walking around the pool until the time that one of the buckets filled to the top and they happened to walk under it.  It was a completely unexpected ambush from above and something that Kennick never took his eye off the rest of the time in the pool.

The next stop on the trip was the DIXIE STAMPEDE.  This is one of Karalee's favorite shows!  We got to the show early and let Kennick look at the horses and got him some souvenirs before the show started.  We got our tickets and off to the pre-show entertainment.  We got a basket of peanuts and a drink.  The music started and it wasn't soon after that Kennick fell asleep.  Gone.  The show finished, we went to the Stampede, order food, etc and all the time I was holding the limp noodle of a boy.  Luckily as they lowered the light he came to and we spent the next hour and a half eating food with no silverware, routing for the south and enjoying the show.  Afterwards we headed back to the pool.

Even after an extremely long day before everyone was up by 7:00 am.  After an early breakfast, you guessed, we headed to the pool.  Kennick, still eyeing the buckets, was completely entertained poolside.  I did learn that there is nothing more invigorating than going down a water slide with a 2 year old at 7:30 in the morning.  This was obviosly a ploy by Kennick to help wake me up.

Next stop on the trip was the Gatlingburg Aquarium.  We were lucky to hit pretty decent traffic until we got into Gatlinburg.  It was completely insane but we were able to carefully navigate our way through.  We did have a little issue with parking and one of the parking garages but it did lead us to a really good spot that we lucked out with.  The Aquarium was fun.  We saw and learned about many different animals and it was nice to be in the air conditioning.

Next stop was a little stroll down the streets and ended up at the salt water taffy store and then to Ben and Jerry's.  We then piled into the car again and started our trek home.  Kennick didn't last too long until he was passed out for a majority of the trip home.

We are notorious for embarking on short weekend marathon trips though we haven't had many since Kennick has been born.  We were glad to see that he can hold up to the adventures.  We all had a great time on Karalee's Birthday Weekend!!