large extended family!

This past weekend was all about spending some quality time with our extended family. My husband, James’ mother is one of 7. Five of the siblings, their children and our grandparents gathered together in Tennessee for the weekend. Aunt Sandy was celebrating a special birthday and wanted to be surrounded by her family. While at the cabin we had a pretty enjoyable time with everyone. We even took a few pictures! I took along the tripod and did a few runs back and forth to the camera setting the self-timer. This shot includes almost everyone looking at the camera – not sure it would have ever happened that all 21 people would have been smiling at the camera at once! Jameson was performing one of his silly moments, which is quite typical so it is well documented here!

Our travels to and from the cabin are a totally different story. I’m honestly not sure that we will ever go back to the Great Smoky Mountains. On our way, before we had even made it out of our county, a semi turned over right in front of us (yes we actually watched it tip over). We stopped, called 911 and made sure the driver was okay. Then we continued on our way. The next bit of excitement came from the back of a dump truck…that had FIRE shooting out of the dump part, while the driver was just standing next to it. And if that wasn’t enough excitement for one trip to the mountains, while we were actually going over THE mountain traffic completely stopped. We weren’t sure exactly what had caused it but at about the second hour mark, James was not happy. We then realized that everyone was slowing down to take pictures of a momma bear and her cub. They were cute but not cute enough to cause us 2.5 extra hours in the car. So overall what is supposed to take on 3 hours took us about 5.5. So Sunday when we were getting ready to return home we decided to go the other way, which should take about 4 hours but mostly all interstate so a bit more predictable – so we thought. Not so for us! As we were traveling down the road, traffic stopped and we were directed to exit and get back on going the opposite direction. After finding a new route to get to Asheville we discovered that there was a major rockslide earlier that morning. (Thankfully no one was trapped by this huge natural occurrence.) So overall we did lots of driving over the weekend and got to spend some extra quality time with each other in the truck! Last year when we were returning from this same location it took us 10 hours because there was snow on the mountain. Six cars ahead of us two vehicles slide into each other and caught on fire. So like I said, I’m not really sure we’ll be returning to this beautiful portion of the US anytime soon!

Now I’m off to prepare for a whirlwind of a weekend ahead…5 sessions within 72 hours plus possible dash of rain + Halloween = an amazing weekend. Lately I have been truly praising God for all that He does in our lives. He truly is amazing.