...

Fun day today at KidPak!  We started our series "Exodus" once more, and it's a shorter version of it, but it will still be a lot of fun.  This morning we talked about Moses and the Burning Bush, about the big moment where God tells Moses to go and set His people free.  We had our usual fun with games and a great message from Pastor Tucker, but also a pretty fun skit with three of our cast members dressed as cows, mainly because the sheep costumes are in Braselton.  It was actually a lot of fun, as the cast members added quite a bit of energy to the morning.  Maddie took pictures as she usually does, and shared those at the church's website - but here are just a few from this morning's service, which went really well.

After church, we picked up some Chinese food from down the street, and got home to enjoy a feast.  Maddie took a fairly big nap this afternoon, and we enjoyed the rain pouring outside.  It was a nice afternoon with the occasional boom of thunder way overhead, the pitter-patter of rain on the leaves in the woods - it was a nice afternoon.

We'll have more on this day in a bit... it's still ongoing!

 

...

 ...

Pirates, Team Edge, 3 1/2 hours, leaf blowing, brunch, onion jelly... updates coming soon...

Phantom

Last day of Spring Break!  We had a decent day, a quiet day too, certainly when compared to all the action of the last few days.  In fact, I was pretty worn down the entire day.  Still, the show must go on as they say, and there was a service to plan for this upcoming Sunday at KidPak.  I got right on that at the office, and can't do anything without Mom's help.  She was there for a bit, gathering costumes and working hard to help things get going for Sunday.  It'll be a good day, the start of our series "Exodus," and a return to that story from the Bible.  Earlier we had watched "The Ten Commandments" in honor of that, and soon we'll have to watch "The Prince of Egypt," particularly with the passing of Val Kilmer recently.  Along those lines, on the treadmill I started watching "Tombstone," just because it is one of the top five western movies ever made, right?  Maddie will have to watch that some time.  In the meantime, tonight's viewing was "The Phantom of the Opera," at least the musical movie.  None of us had seen this before, the movie version of the play that wasn't too bad.  The music of course is really good, and I'm fairly close to having the entire first act of it memorized as I listened to it so often back in the day.  Self-control had me not singing along the entire time and annoying everyone about that!  So the reason for the viewing was our recent Discworld book that we're reading, "Maskerade," which we're nearly done with. We read some from that tonight, and I think we'll actually be done with the book tomorrow.  I would have finished tonight, but I was so incredibly tired that I was falling asleep while reading it out loud.  Have you ever done that before?  It's such a surreal thing reading a book out loud and falling asleep while you do that.  Maddie's like... ?  And I sort of return and say, "Ya know?  I think maybe we take a break here and finish up tomorrow?"

It was a sunny day today, and it's really warm out there - nice weather!  Although I think it's supposed to get colder again soon?  Spring weather up and down.  But wow, we sure did time things right with our trip.  Thank you, Lord!

So what did Maddie do today on her last day of Spring Break?  We mentioned going to taekwondo, of course.  Maddie spent a good bit of sparring.  She sometimes really likes it, other times not so much.  Let's just say it's "hit or miss."  See what I did there?

Anyway, it was a good day, and an early sleep for me, at least.  We'll sleep in a bit tomorrow, but there's taekwondo, and maybe some other things tomorrow night to do.  We'll see you then!

Flying Pigs

See the flying pigs?  Yes, we came back to Old MacDonald's Mini-Golf Course.  Last year we had a really fun thing happened - over the course of a  few different games, each of us had gotten a hole-in-one on the very last hole of each course.  It's a challenging thing, and doesn't happen terribly often (it didn't happen today for any of us!).  So for all three of us to get this was pretty cool, and what was the prize?  A free game!  Yes, last year we won three free games, and we had up to a year to redeem the free tickets.  That's why we returned here this morning for a really fun time playing mini-golf!

By the way, Mom beat both Maddie and I pretty handily, getting three solid holes-in-one, plus about a few more near misses.  She was on fire today!

Of course, today was the last day of our stay at the Inn at Christmas Place - for now.  We had our really big breakfast buffet with all the good food, and there was Santa there again for pictures and greeting.  We got in our Santa picture for the year again, and that was a nice little bonus to the day!

And of course there were other photo ops outside that we did again, which are always fun!

Ah, another nice meal outside here.  Just watch out for the static electricity!  These chairs are high up and plastic, so there's no grounding here.  So yeah, you can build up a good static charge to zap your grounded neighbor if they are standing nearby... ZAP!

Outside of the zapping, this meal is super pleasant in the mornings, and this was just a good way to say goodbye to the Inn for now.

The ride home was nice and easy.  You can see the rubber chicken has been with us again, a hilarious response to the "no honking your horns" sign that is in front of the Pigeon Forge tunnel.  Maddie rolls down the window and honks this rubber chicken over and over again the entire length of the tunnels in Tennessee.  Awesome!

Here's Joey at one of our stops on the way home.  Somewhere south of Clayton, we stop at the Blue Ridge Honey Company to pick up a few things like jams, honeys, and a honey sweetened cream soda that Maddie likes.  

But we got home in time to get ready... and go out again.  Yes, Maddie was at taekwondo tonight, and that went a lot later than usual, just because Maddie was hanging out with students.  When we got home, Mom was ready for a movie - and in honor of our recent trip to Dollywood, we rented "9 to 5."  Maddie liked that one - I hadn't seen it in decades, but there were certain lines that I really remember for some reason.

After that, we did our reading from "Maskerade," and a likely culprit has been finally discovered.  We'll see how things go from this point on, but things are winding down with this story now, which we're both enjoying.  Afterwards we said our prayers, and everyone got tucked in for a good night's rest.  

Wow, what a full day!  It was fun though!

"I Will Always Love You Festival"

This morning we got to sleep in a bit.  We had a nice night last night, and this morning we had a fantastic breakfast. There's that buffet there, complete with the omelette station.  I had a spinach omelette.  Maddie had an omelette too.  Mom got some great gluten free options, some gluten-free toast and a gluten-free dessert brownie too!  We ate well, and then we were on our way, a short drive up to Dollywood, where folks were lining up quickly for the trams.  The lines moved really well though, and we were soon on our first official ride at Dollywood.

Here we are back in the Dollyverse for a quick vacation, the reason being it was spring break and also Mom and I are about to go crazy with Easter stuff for the week.  We're only here for two nights, and we got those season passes, so we thought we'd make the best of it and check out the "I Will Always Love You" Festival here, which was pretty nice.  The decorations are different, starting with the overhanging items in the walkthrough area at the beginning.  They go from umbrellas to kites to fall leaves, and now this time of year there's just a lot of pink around here!

This was one of our many destinations today, the newly refurbished Dolly museums here.  We swung by here first, but given that we had a cup full of Dr. Pepper in Maddie's hands, we opted to come back later when that was empty.  Still, it made for some nice initial pictures.

We were off at the Rocking Roadway first, this after getting our season passes all set up.  That was no big issue - we got our pictures done, and Maddie even photobombed my picture on my ID.  

Maddie got a nice car that she was really excited about.  She loves these old cars, and maybe this ride is the source of all that nostalgia and excitement.  But she loves the aesthetic of the cars of this era, and was super happy that she got a car with tail fins.

Joey was along for the ride too!

Here she is with another roadster outside the old gas station there.  You can see the sun was out and shining - it was shaping up to be a pretty warm day outside!  We were on our way to a new show to see, one that is specific to this festival, but the start time was a little later and we had some time to kill, so we stopped in a few gift shops to take a look around.  This was a fun little shirt here, one just right for Maddie:

Okay, so the show was "From the Heart," and it is in that big theater, the DP Celebrity Theater.  It was nice and cool and we had a few empty seats in front of us at dead center, so we got to enjoy the entire thing in some really nice and cool seating!

All three of us enjoyed the show quite a bit.  It was a lot of music, of course, but it basically was a biography of Dolly Parton through the years.  It really set up the visit to the museum for us afterwards, which is pretty much where we went to immediately following the show.

The museum was quite a different experience than the old version, and it there was a lot of great improvements.  We enjoyed it quite a bit, walking through the exhibits and different interactive places.  

This room was a larger area with projected movies on the wall - you could just sit down on the floor and watch as you were taken through the Smoky Mountains and a bit of Dolly's history.

So we had enough time after that to go to another small museum, this one taking the place of a high-end shop that used to be there at that location. But they did a great job with a whole building dedicated to just costuming.  As you could imagine, Mom really enjoyed this one.  Maddie and Joey did too!

Dolly wall magnets.  Not sure how long this idea will last, but it seemed like a good idea at the time!  It was fun, and we can say we made a few paper doll ideas, including an early rejected idea that features a banjo on Dolly's head with a wig on it.

Okay, we were in the area, so next we were exactly on time to see another show that was right there, one featuring Dolly's niece Heidi.  We'd seen this group perform before, but this particular production was a different set of music, and it was another nice chance for music to tell a story.

And then, it was time to eat!  We were all about heading to the Front Porch.  It was later, so it wasn't crowded at all, and we got some really big portions of food on our plates.  Maddie loves the vibe here, the three of us filling up with some good food.  

I got a butterfly-shaped pretzel sandwich with grilled chicken and more...

Maddie enjoyed the chicken she got, and all the fries she could eat too!

Okay, so next we realized that the River Rampage ride was open, and that was possibly our first tactical error of the day.  We got on line, and it was a slightly longer line than expected, but it was a pretty sunny warm day outside, so there's that.  Oh, by the way - about that weather.  We're in this little window of heat, and then things get cold and/or rainy afterwards, and of course it was like that beforehand.  What I'm saying is that we had things timed perfectly.

So, about that "tactical error."  Maddie and I knew we'd get a little wet.  But what we didn't realize was that there'd be a small technical malfunction on the ride!  Basically, the belt device that moves boats along stopped working at one point, and all the boats were stuck in the waiting line, and we got stopped... right there at the waterfall!

Yeah, we were soaked after that!  It was fun though, and although the day was winding down, we made time to hop on the train and go for a ride through the park, always a nice journey.

And now it was getting later.  But we were so close to a few more things that we wanted to squeeze those in before calling it a day.  First of all, we just had to do the Demolition Derby - the bumper cars!

We didn't have much of a line there, and we had a blast as always!  This is tradition!  Maddie got a few good hits in, but then again, so did I.  Great fun as always.  Okay, it was time to leave.  Pretty much.  But oh my, there's the carousel, right?  Why not just hop on for one... last ... ride...

It was really nice, a great way to end the day.  We didn't even make it to the other side of the park at all.  But we had such a full day, and we've got these season passes, so we know we'll be back to visit elsewhere.  We've got a few things on the "to do" list, including a visit to the church, a huge apple pie, some quality time where the craftsmen are, plus at least another roller coaster ride.  So we'll be back for sure!  We made our way back to the front entrance, snapping a few more photos along the way.

Large axolotls as prizes?  Maybe next time!

It was a fun day.  We shopped a bit in the Emporium, but of course it's always such a hugely crowded place.  We might look online for some of that stuff later on.  It was pleasant looking around.  Also, Maddie got a new Dolly sticker for her computer.  

But soon enough, it was time to head back to the hotel.  Back to the last ride of the park, the tram!

We got back to the hotel, and it's such a short drive.  But we were fairly exhausted from the day.  I packed another Christmas movie, so we watched "Rise of the Guardians" tonight, and the idea was to get to bed at a decent hour.  Unfortunately, the family right above us was a little loud - fortunately, Mom had those noise canceling headphones that I got her for Christmas, and I was able to get some sleep.  Mom and Maddie can sleep through that, but I'm apparently a light sleeper.

Anyway, we did do our reading by the way.  And we said our prayers.  After that, time to sleep from a full, fun day.