Tennessee: Part 1

It's been crazy hot here this summer, and we aren't fans of using the AC in the car for extended periods of time, so we took advantage of the fact that Little Guy wakes us up a couple of times a night and hit the road by about 5:15 AM.  We had planned to drive only halfway - about 5 1/2 hours - so we could be out of the car by the hottest part of the day.  To that end, we went online to bid on a hotel and managed to get something that was not only really cheap but also turned out to be a mostly legit establishment, with a couple of notable exceptions:

1) It appeared that a family of ducks had taken up permanent residence in the swimming pool.

2) When I asked the woman at the front desk if the hotel had a gym (as we'd been led to believe by their website), she said, "There's a fitness room on the second floor.  It's not the greatest; it's just cardio, but there's a treadmill that works.  You'll need this key for it."  And she handed me the magnetic tag to activate the treadmill.  So I took the key upstairs and found the fitness room, which had 5 cardio machines in it, 3 of which were obviously not working (e.g. control panels ripped off).  There were 2 treadmills; I was fooled into thinking that the one with the screen lit up would work.  It did not.  The second treadmill did, in fact, work when I attached the key, but it was really noisy and thumpy, and the key wouldn't really stay attached by itself, so I had to try to hold it in place while running, which made things really awkward.  I didn't last long.

The next day, we drove the rest of the way to Knoxville to stay with E's brother's family for a couple of days.  Little Guy met the first of many aunts, uncles, and cousins who continued to arrive for the reunion in bunches over the next couple of days. 

My dad also drove down from Richmond to meet Little Guy.  During his visit, we did a little hike up Clingman's Dome (we forgot our camera) and had brunch at The French Market in Knoxville, which was delicious.

Then we were off to the cabin in Gatlinburg for the reunion.