Our mostly soggy, but super fun mountain getaway!

We drove to Blowing Rock, NC and our little cabin the day of the 4th of July. We listened to the rain pour down on the roof all afternoon as we explored our place and then relaxed before heading out for dinner. We chose a friendly BBQ place...

The rain was coming down so hard as we drove back that night that we sat in the car for about 20 minutes with hopes of it letting up so we could get inside without getting soaked to the bone.  We finally braved it one at a time with Dad holding the umbrella up and down the steps from the cabin to the car.  He was definitely soaked in the end!  We listened to the rain come down all night long... The next morning we headed up the mountain to visit Linville Caverns.  It was still pretty rainy, and we were warned it was drippy on the tour, so we all got one of these to wear...

What a fascinating, beautiful thing to see natural caves inside the mountainside!  The kids all enjoyed the tour until the end when the guide let us experience total darkness.  Presley especially got a little scared, but she was a trooper!

There was a great indoor pool at the resort we stayed at.  In fact, we went swimming two days in a row and had the pool mostly to ourselves - fun!

The hot tub made it even better of course!  On the morning of my birthday we went to breakfast at a little cafe in Boone - check out how much food is still on MY plate after everyone else's had been cleared.  I got the big breakfast with a little of everything, yum!

A little later we went to check out the famous and original Mast General Store in Blowing Rock...

there was a great park nearby that would have been even more fun had it not been raining so much.  It was soggy, but gorgious!  And we were enjoying our first day without having to worry about the rain so much.  It would come and go, but we did see the sun on my birthday!  In fact, later that day we decided to go float down one of the slower moving rivers nearby.  What an adventure!  Although we spent way to much time waiting and waiting to get on our tubes, when we finally got in, the sun sparkled off the water for most of the time and with our tubes all tied together we had a pretty uneventful float down (except for the occasional tree branches we ran into and Avery's tantrum about the dirty water and bugs in her tube).  At the end though, we had quite the moment when the river guides were trying to get us pulled to the side and out of the water.  The water level of the river was extremely high and they had a hard time getting out to us - we almost floated on by....Hmmm...

After we said goodbye to our cabin on the last day of our stay, we headed to Grandfather Mountain.  There were clear skies and we were hopeful we'd have a good view when we got to the top.

Here we are crossing the famous bridge,

and standing a mile high in the air.

Of course the kids wanted to climb as far as they could...and the view we had was spectacular.  Nothing beats the green and beauty of NC mountains!

After a little picnic lunch we went to see the black bears at the nature reserve close by.

Caleb has a favorite stuffed animal that he's had since we moved here.  "Blacky" got to come along and see the real thing too.

We took a jaunt through the gift shop of course.  Aaron took this artsy picture of these bottles of wine because of the name, but we'll also remember them because someone bumped the display and a few bottles went crashing to the ground :)  We were lucky not to have to pay for them and got to spend some money on souvenirs - more stuffed animals and a collector's baseball.

We finished off our little trip with a really big and really tasty ice cream cone - perfect!