3rd Anniversary

John and I celebrated our 3rd anniversary this past (long) weekend. We rented a tiny cabin on the side of a mountain for three nights. We drove to my parents' house in Winston-Salem to drop off Hannah and spent Wednesday night there. When we left Thursday morning, John surprised me with tickets to visit the Biltmore House in Asheville. We had talked about visiting many times, but never actually did anything about it! I was excited! We spent a large part of Thursday there, exploring every inch of the house and large portions of the gardens. Here I am in front of the mansion; we were bummed that the bus go in the shot :-/ Unfortunately, I started to develop a cold while we were in Asheville and I wasn't feeling too well Friday morning, so we took it easy- we watched a lot of HGTV on the High Def TV at the cabin, which was pretty nice. In the afternoon, we took a short trip along some beautiful mountain roads to check out Fontana Dam, which was built in the 1940s as part of the TVA dam project. John enjoyed the engineering related to the workings of the dam and I enjoyed reading about the history of the location, the building of the dam, the workers and their families to moved to the area, etc. (The 1940s is my favorite era.)

Pretty big, huh?? This is just one of the tunnels.

On Saturday, I was feeling a tad better - thanks in large part to my massive HGTV watching/relaxing, so we took most of the day and explored (mostly by car, but a bit on foot) Great Smokey Mountains National Park. We drove from Cherokee, NC all the way to Gatlinburg, TN all through the mountains. We really enjoyed the views while we were driving around all those twisty roads. A highlight was when a bear cub ran across the road about 50 yards in front of us! Pretty cool to see.

This is a shot John took from Newfound Gap, which is one of the main stops on the main road through the park. It is right on the NC/TN line. You can see why they are called the Great Smokeys.

We took a couple of short hikes (one was about 0.5 miles and another was 2.6 miles) to see waterfalls. This is the first and smallest one we encountered; our camera died at this point, so we don't have pictures of the larger ones. I really enjoyed finding my waterfalls :) We couldn't resist a picture of John tasting the fresh mountain water :-p

We checked out Sunday morning and headed back to pick up our baby girl, who had been spoiled rotten by her Nana and Papa :) I did miss her, but I am really glad we got a chance to get away alone and spend time together just relaxing and exploring in the mountains!