12-Hour Journey Home

Everyone in the family was up and moving bright and early at the cabin this morning, before the sun was even up for the day. Meg & Papa picked out these matching Stitch t-shirts at the outlets yesterday, and all the girls wore them home today. (Addie was too grumpy for the group photo though.)

We did successfully complete the puzzle a couple of nights ago, and mom even brought her puzzle glue to the cabin, so she was able to put a few coats on it to transport it home. Then she’s gonna hang it up at her house as a permanent vacation memory!

We finished up the final bits of packing and loading and cleaning we needed to do around the cabin, and got on the road just a little past 7:30am, just in time to see this beautiful sunrise sky at the top of our mountain! We hadnt actually gotten to see much a sunrise at all this week, so we were lucky to get this on our final morning.

We didn’t make it very far down the road (about 10 minutes), before Addie needed a potty break, and then another 20-30 or so, and we found a Bucee’s for gas and a brisket & egg breakfast taco.

We drove through some truly awful, terrible weather this morning for about an hour or so, with more lightning strikes all around us than we could count. Jeff and I were both praying the whole way that we would be safe, and that the rest of our family would be safe wherever they were, since we didn’t actually caravan all together today. We made it to the Georgia welcome center just south of Chattanooga, and stopped for another potty break, where the girls found some magazines and brochures to bring in the car with them.

Then we made it a little further to Marietta, for a pizza lunch, at the same restaurant we ate lunch at last May, on our way home from Nashville.

This little girl fought nap time hard after lunch, but she eventually couldn’t stay awake any longer, and then napped for about 1.5 hours. (I on the other hand, napped on and off for most of the day, when I wasn’t scared of the scary weather. It was a long week and I didn’t sleep great at night, so the car just lulled me to sleep in no time flat today!)

We stopped at the same Gas n Go in Cussetta, GA, again today that we stopped at last week, and had to do the ice cream photo again of course.

We knew it was getting a bit too late to try to make it home for dinner, so while I drove, Jeff picked out a place to stop and eat in Bainbridge. He found this place called Hoss’s, and it was so good. Very down home, casual, and very delicious. I loved my All-American cheeseburger, but my fave was definitely the fried green tomatoes. Jeff had a fried chicken stuffed spud, which he raved about. The girls both had chicken bites & cheese grits, and Emerson said it was the best dinner.

How perfect does this look!? Like the most perfect, typical American burger, and it tasted just as good as it looked.

The girls had to run around the parking lot for 5-10 minutes afterwards, to help get some wiggles out, after being in the car for so long today.

Earlier in the week, Addie asked something like, “What about our red brick house? Are we going back there?” And then tonight, as we pulled into the driveway, Addie said, “I just really, really wanna go back to our cabin.”

After getting the car unloaded, we got the girls in their jammies and watched a few Bluey episodes, before starting on bedtime. While reading a bedtime Bible story to Addie, she pointed at the mountain and said, “That’s like the mountain from our cabin that we went up in the car! And that we went on a mountain walk!”

We made it home exactly 12 hours after pulling away from the mountain cabin this morning, after crazy weather through Tennessee, very heavy traffic around Atlanta, and lots of stops for food & potty & gas. We actually really like kind of lolly-gagging along and not rushing home on long trips like this, so we won’t feel the pressure to get home as fast as possible. But boy are we so super glad to be back home!

We had an amazing week, and I’m so thankful for this time with our family. It had been way too long since we all went on a family vacation like this (last one was in 2016, pre-kids!), so we were way overdue! We had so much fun, made so many memories, and hopefully we’ll get another chance like this again, but hopefully it won’t take another nine years before we can make it happen again!