Day 28

I was trying to sleep in this morning. We didn't have too many plans for the day and our drive was only 30 minutes so I thought it would be find. Until I started to hear thunder in the distance. We have had to pack up in pouring rain on a couple of occasions and it's definitely the worst so I hopped out of the tent to get things going. Within about 15 minutes we were zipping the last zipper and making a quick breakfast. I kept an eye on the storm the whole time and it seemed to be taking a nice little detour around us. We ate and chatted with our friends for a little while before saying our goodbyes and heading on our way.

The girls have evbeen leaving rocks at all of our campsites for someone to find. We left my stick man "Jimmy" hanging by the table too thinking someone might find it amusing.

We stopped at the Table Rock overlook to show the kids the mountain they'd hiked up the day before. I got the distracted "Wow" from all of them so I took a picture for myself anyway.

We got to our next site pretty early as everyone was packing their sites up. We had our pick of the spots Emily wanted so we were able to set up  pretty quickly and let the kids play awhile. We walked around the campground after lunch exploring the closed sections. They looked like they'd been abandoned for a few years with overgrown everything and no signs of people activity.

I started getting restless so we decided to drive down to Mt Mitchell - the tallest mountain east of the Mississippi. Just like Grandfather Mountain the temperature and weather changed drastically once we got to the top. We took a few minutes to enjoy the museum and gift shop then made the short trek to the observation deck. Not that we could see anything!!

Brayden was the camera guy today so he amused himself taking a few pictures before we headed back down to the car. Unfortunately we could see Big or Little Butt today!

I'm not sure if it was the thinner air up there or my kids are crazy but they asked to see if there was ice cream in the little cafe. I'm thinking hot chocolate might have been more appropriate but we just headed back down the mountain toward our campsite.

We both needed ice for our coolers - almost a daily run with the sunny spots we'd been parked in - so we drove a few miles past our campground to Little Switzerland's General Store. I'd imagined a place with lots of different shops and restaurants surrounding a Swiss-looking inn.

What we found was a restaurant, general store, and book/coffee shop. It took us about 5 minutes to walk through the stores so I was glad we hadn't made a special trip to spend some time there. We did find the speed-readers a couple books to tide them over until Dave brought some more reading material.

When we got back I edited pictures for a little while and the kids played games and read. Laney and Brayden were reading their new books and were halfway finished with them before I made them stop. I am amazed at how fast they can devour books!

Our afternoon storm showed up so Ryan and Evey popped into her tent while the other kids and I retired to ours. Brayden and Laney just wanted to read which was perfectly fine with me!

It was time for dinner after the rain so the kids played while Laney and I cooked. All the kids were chatting non stop about our plans for the next day. We had scheduled horseback riding for the next morning and hopefully it wouldn't be canceled this time! We would need to get on the road early in the morning so we went to bed a little early too after a few chapters of our book. It's getting to the good parts where the kids keep begging for one more chapter!