June 12th-21st, 2018

Going Home…. not for good…yet. This is just a vacation to our home town.

7 days home in Georgia and 2 travel days.

It’s been 10 months since we’ve seen our family and friends and oh how we miss them!

Our travel day was long, we were flying out of Kalispell, MT connecting through Salt Lake City and then landing in Atlanta at 11pm, followed by an hour drive home. The Duprees offered to pick us up from the airport. I expected the normal Atlanta curbside pickup BUT with the Duprees you get the VIP treatment! They greeted us inside the airport with homemade welcome signs! I’ve never received such a sweet home coming before.

After being in the PNW and then Montana in the cold, we were ready for summer! Bring on the heat and humidity. We stayed cool all week by hanging out at pools and lakes. We really are blessed with the best friends ever! Even after not seeing them and hardly talking (because we are on such different schedules and time zones) we were able to pick up right where we left off 10 months ago.

Thank you to the Smith’s for opening their beautiful home up for us! We had a wonderful lunch and afternoon hanging out. We forgot to take a picture of the adults hanging out:(

Would you believe me if I told you I had a spreadsheet for our week here because trying to coordinate everyone’s schedules with family vacations mixed in is challenging. Even minute was occupied! I’m sad we didn’t get to see everyone but we will be back in January for a whole month so we can catch up then.

The next day we hung out at the Duprees. Instead of cooling off, we heated things up. So hot in fact the fire department may have paid us a visit. Everyone was safe and we will definitely be laughing about this day for years.

We enjoyed fishing, airsoft and drinking tea on the porch chatting. Anya and I were able to sneak in a quiet hike (Iron Hill Trail) at Red Top Mountain.

I’ve been friends with this group of ladies for a long time…BC (before children). We’ve been getting together once a month for 14 years. We met for dinner at Marlow’s tavern and talked till our cheeks were sore. Two of the GNO group were on vacation but I got to see them for a few minutes later in the week.

Our week was filled with sweet reunions with big ‘ole hugs and welcome home signs!

One of the hardest things about full-time traveling and living on the road is not getting to celebrate birthdays with your friends. The Hutto’s were so sweet to open their beautiful home up to Abby to celebrate her 12th birthday. What a fantastic day of laughing and bonding to last us another 6 months until we get to visit again.

Mackenzie turned 10 two weeks ago so we had her party at Sky Zone! Lots of fun running around, jumping, climbing and nerf guns. Oh how we miss playing with friends.

There were many sleepovers and hangouts.

We drove up to Chattanooga for the weekend to visit family, celebrate birthday’s and Father’s Day. Mackenzie’s gift was as big as her. Upon seeing it for the first time I immediately thought “How are we going to fit that on the RV?” and “How am I getting that on the plane?” I figured what ever it was, it was going to have to stay on at the grandparents until we get back in January. As it turns out, the gift was small enough to fit in a wallet. Tim and Karen had a cute presentation for her gift. Mackenzie opened up the huge box and out flowed 10 balloons. She was instructed to pop each one and hidden inside each one was cash! How exciting!

Abby’s gift was presented in a creative way as well. Abby loves pizza so they presented her with a personalized pizza, only instead of pizza, there was an array of dough… money that is.

I received a beautiful painting of the whale in front of the lighthouse we saw in Maui together. That will have to stay in Chattanooga until we get a stationary house:)

We continued the celebration with dinner at a Mexican restaurant on the water.

My sister traveled from Asheville, NC to visit with us and my brother’s family traveled from Knoxville to spend the weekend with us as well. We celebrated Luke’s 12th birthday by the pool. On Father’s Day we found a swimming hole (North Chick Blue Hole) in TN to spend the day at. We jumped off rocks, fly fished, snorkeled, and relaxed.

This group of ladies (TBB) has been gathering together for 2 years but it feels like we’ve know each other for a lifetime.This photo about sums up our night together. Thank you to the Watkins for having us over to your beautiful backyard. AKA…the amenities at Campsite #1.

A day at Lake Acworth with the Daniells. Just like old times, we never miss a beat. If you’ve never been, visit during the summer months when they have the world’s largest inflatable water slide. It’s a blast!

Laney and Abby have been friends since before they were born…literally. They lovely recreated this picture for us!

We stayed at Francey’s… well by stayed, I mean kept our stuff there. I slept here but the girls were hardly ever home. We celebrated birthday’s here as well. Now, where am I going to put all these gifts, got an extra suitcase Grandma? Thank you for all you do.

On the way to the airport we stopped off for a quick treat, at Pelican’s snoball stand, with the Daniells. So many flavors! Try the Jawbreaker or the POG!

Cynthia and Francey have become great friends!

So long, farewell….all great things must come to an end. We have to leave GA and continue of quest to visit all 50 states in 2 years. We’ll swing back around in mid-January. We will make a trip to Florida to visit my mom and grandmother. Chris’s brother and family are moving to Atlanta area so we will get to see them as well.

I hate mult-stop flights but when you are staying in little towns you have no choice. Our first flight out of Atlanta was delayed for hours so when we go to Salt Lake City we had missed our connector and there were no more flights going out that night. We were suppose to visit Glacier National Park on our last day parked in Columbia Falls and now were were going to miss that because the next flight out in the morning wasn’t until 11am. We looked for a hotel room but because of all the delayed flights Delta didn’t have any and neither did the city of Salt Lake City. Delta was offering pillows and blankets to sleep on the floor in the airport and Chris was offering the last room in the city he could find. Reluctantly, we chose to stay at the hotel. I talked the airport baggage claim guy to finding just the one bag I knew had our pj’s and toothbrushes, I downloaded the Uber app and figured out how to get us a ride to the hotel. We were happy to discover the bag I decided to get our of hock was the one with our swimsuits. We took full advantage of the hotel; even though our heads didn’t hit the pillow until 2:00am we got up at 8:00am to swim in the pool before heading to the airport again.