I hope you had a wonderful holiday, whatever you celebrate, and a great New Year! Here's what I've been up to the past week and a half! Andrew and I started off my Christmas break by installing a heater in our van. Andrew did pretty much all of it but I helped when I could. It took much longer than we anticipated, with a few mishaps along the way, but he got it working and it came in handy over this break!
We went back to my hometown in Wisconsin for Christmas. We always get together with my dad's side of the family on Christmas Eve.
Christmas day is spent with my mom's side. My sister hosts Christmas day and my brother-in-law started a grease fire on his Traeger. I ran out to help at first but realized I couldn't really do anything because they needed a fire extinguisher so I went and grabbed my phone and recorded it. Now the video is going viral and ending up on random smoking meats pages on social media lol. See the video here!
After all that excitement we continued on with our Christmas celebration and everything from then on went great! Here I am with my adorable niece :)
The day after Christmas, Andrew and I jetted off in our camper van to the Smoky Mountains. The first night we stayed in Knoxville and it's SUCH a cool/cute city. I wish we would have spent a little more time there.
Our camper van only has a bed, cabinet and storage in it right now so we have to improvise a lot of things. We slept near a public park in Knoxville so I got ready in their bathroom the next morning lol.
We went to Gatlinburg after Knoxville and I have to say, it might be my least favorite city I've ever been to. This viewpoint was cool but outside of that it was just way too touristy. I know it was the holidays so it was extra busy but it was filled with so many people who walk slow, gimmicky restaurants, t-shirt shops, all the things that make a tourist town and it wasn't what I was expecting at all. The traffic was so bad we parked miles away to even get into the main part of the city. I do not plan to ever go back there.
The main part of the trip was to spend time in the Smoky Mountains.
We didn't have the best weather one of the days we were there but did get to see a bunch of elk!
We spent the rest of the trip on the North Carolina side of the Smokys and explored Asheville. There is still a lot of devastation from Hurricane Helene but the city is still thriving and I loved it! The River Arts District got hit pretty bad but we still explored the area and walked through the shops that were still open and met this very interesting and awesome artist named Shoshana.
We saw this Double Decker bus and realized it was a coffee shop so I had to check it out. I'm not a foodie person, I could care less where we eat on trips, but I love finding great coffee shops!
I had heard about Asheville having book stores with champagne bars so we went to check out this one and thought it was such a unique concept! You can hang out and drink champagne while browsing books and buying one to read.
It rained everyday of the trip up until a few days in so we finally did a hike just outside of Asheville to Lookout Mountain.
The next morning we got up early to do a big hike in the Smokys. They kept closing the roads down because of high winds so when we got there early, we couldn't get in. We decided to just hang out in the van and wait until it opened. Doesn't this look like something out of a horror movie?
Once we finally got in, we hiked to Mount LeConte! It was such a great hike, I highly recommend doing it if you enjoy hiking and ever end up in the Smokys!
One night we slept at an overlook on the Foothills Parkway in Tennessee. We got in late and woke up in the morning to the most gorgeous views!
We broke up the drive back to the Twin Cities by visiting my friends Ayantu and Jake in Chicago. We spent New Years Eve at their place and they cooked us a wonderful NYE dinner! We were very excited to eat a home cooked meal and to have access to a shower. We only showered once this entire trip. Our last van trip it was warm enough to shower outside but this one, it was not.
Excited to get back into more of a routine but also had a fantastic time just wandering around Wisconsin, Tennessee, North Carolina, & Illinois the last week and a half!