House Hunting

With Mike only having a couple more months of Law school, we decided we better start looking for houses. This is the one we found:  

What do you think?  With 250 rooms, 43 bathrooms, an indoor pool and bowling ally, two libraries, and a view of the smokey mountains, what more could you ask for?  Actually, we went on a mini vacation this week to the Smokey Mountains.  This is one of the places we wanted to go before we leave Nashville.  We left Monday morning and came back Tuesday night.  When we woke up Tuesday, it was snowing in Gatlinburg, TN and the road we wanted to take into the Smokey's was closed so we detoured and went to Asheville, North Carolina to see the Biltmore.  The biggest house in the United States which you see above.  It was a lot of fun to see and was already decorated inside for Christmas.  George Vanderbilt owned this house and Mike just happened to be wearing his Vanderbilt sweatshirt so he got a lot of questions.  It was very pretty and was a lot bigger than we were expecting it to be.  After touring the house, you could drive around the grounds where there are six gardens, a winery, and a farm.  It was a great little getaway.  

The leaves in Nashville are still pretty green.  Those that are changing are dull in color so we were excited for this trip.  I had to take advantage of it while I can since this will be my last year experiencing fall (which by the way, is my favorite season) and mountains/hills.  We didn't realize the Smokey's were so big!  The leaves were beautiful and so colorful.  The pictures don't do it justice. You can't see a lot of the hills in the pictures.  The town of Gatlinburg was cute and just like a mountain town.  It was a lot colder than we expected so that made it difficult for pictures and doing things outside.  We tried to stay inside when we could.  We went to the Aquarium and to a mirror maze which actually turned out to be a lot of fun.  It is dark in the maze except for lighting on the ground.  At one point Kyia saw me and started running toward me and ran right into a mirror.  It was actually my reflection she saw.  We had a lot of fun in there and it is surprisingly harder than it sounds.  And thanks to Mr. Mapquest (Mike) we were able to see a few animals while we were driving also.  A big elk, a grey fox, and raccoons.  Somehow on each trip we go on, we end up taking a detour because Mike knows a shorter, faster way.  This "shorter, faster way" ended up costing us 3 hours but we saw a lot of pretty areas we wouldn't have seen otherwise.  We had a great trip and are so glad we went.  Since it was so cold, most of the tree pictures are taken from inside the car.  On a side note, on our trip Brooklyn starting laughing and has slept through the night two nights in a row! :)