Christmas vacation - Gammichia style

Happy Friday,

Where was I? Oh, yeah. I was telling you just about the trip up to the mountains. We got to the mountains and we were basically snowed out of our house. Long story short, we rented a condo for the 4 remaining days.

I rented this condo begrudgingly because I knew they had had enough, but I had seen this house and to me it was worth the wait. If we had to rent a place for one more day then got to go to the house, it would be worth it. But they just wanted a place and I got that.

Everyone settled in and most of them went to Pigeon Forge, and the Gammichias stayed back. It would have been a 3 hour drive to get there (oh and that means a 3 hour drive back). So they did their thing, and we did ours. We went to a little town about 40 minutes away, did some shopping and had lunch. It was nice to just be with us.

On the way back into the mountains is when we found out that our kids get car sick.
Oh yeah!!!! The kids were watching a movie in the back seat and when one of them looked up it was, "I don't feel so good... [barf]."

No time to react. Oh,the joys of parenting. My wife and I look at each other and I say, "Hey, I am driving what do you want me to do?" So, we get this all cleaned up (I say "we", I mean my wife - hey I was driving), and we make another trip to see if we can get to the house.



And we got close. There is a main road up the mountain that we were able to navigate. This is a picture of the road that is off the main road that leads to the road that the house is on.

Did you follow? Main road (paved,curvy, winding straight up), another road (pictured above, paved) and then the road our house was on. All the roads were paved except for the road our house was on.



The house was down and around to the left on road in the above photo. About 300 yards. I caught up to the plowing guy and he said that this road was gravel and he was not responsible for gravel roads.

We sat at the end of this road and wondered. Can we park here and drag our luggage to the house? Man, were we in a pinch. Meanwhile, we had a snow ball fight.





Kids had a blast but ended up crying because I hit them in the face with snowballs. NOT ON PURPOSE. I swear. And we made snow angels.

(Not bad for a Florida boy, huh?)

We decided to bag the whole house thing. It was going to be a pain in the ass to convince everyone to pack everything up again for the fourth time and go up the mountain only to have to drag their luggage 300 yards in the snow. So we left it alone. The next day we went sledding.



The condo backed up to a golf course. We found a par 5 that was downhill and went to town. It was great.


I have to tell you, living in the south, I hate the cold. But when you get to see snow again, it really is great. Great to see for a week or two then go home. By the way, 60 degrees today in the Sunshine State.

That night, we went out to dinner because a couple of the folks had birthdays. Remember I invited 7 people and this was our group (one family of 5 is missing in the photo).



The next day we went snow skiing and had a ball. Noah cried and cried for the first hour and then after that was like a little champ. Luke went snow boarding and loved it. I got my bearings (it was like riding a bike) and was like a champ out there. Good powder and not very crowded. Good times.

We had our second throw up in the car but this time we had a big baggie to barf in.
We zipped it up and viola, no mess. Now the ski lodge has a plastic bag full of puke in one of their hedges (hey, it was my wife. She said, "I looked for a trashcan and there wasn't any around". Sounded fine to me).

Crazy trip. On many occasions, I felt like Clark Griswald. Remember the scene where he just loses it, the "quest for fun" scene? (If you don't like the F-bomb, don't click on this link.) Yeah, that was me a couple of times. But I apologized to the kids and we moved on.

But nobody got hurt. We got to see snow. We snow skied. We had several snowball fights. We went sledding. We enjoyed each other and the family. All in all, I think it was a pretty successful trip. Now I just need a vacation from my vacation.

Thanks for walking down memory lane with me. Oh yeah, and that "free" house I got up in the mountains cost me about $800 to never get to.

Did you guys go on vacation? Anything funny? Let me know.

Back to all dental next week.
john