wrapping up our time in the smokies

our week in the smokies wrapped up with a day of playing...we just kind of lazed around the cabin for awhile, then off we went. first to get a waterproof camera, then to pick up some lunch, then to little river for tubing. it looked pretty fun in the pictures i'd seen on all those brochures that are everywhere, and everyone else thought so too, so that's what we decided to do. we picked the "lazy river" option, which would take us about 1.5 hours or so. then we could go back and do it again or not, whatever we wanted to do. only $8 for all day, open to close. pretty great deal! we hopped on the shuttle with our gigantic green inner tubes and were dropped off at a little spot where we followed a path to the river. that was it - walk to the river, hop on your inner tube and float on down the river. no problem, right? haha!! for some reason i was a little weirded out by the whole thing when we stepped into the river (NO idea why, and i got over it pretty soon) and greg flipped over in his inner tube as soon as he got in it. i'm thinking, "this is just perfect."....anyway, it got 3000% better from there, except for one more flip-over for greg. as i said, it looked fun, but not like a ton of fun...but i was wrong! we had an absolute blast! just the time together, and crazy little spots we'd get ourselves stuck in, and talking on the way down the river, laughing so much along the way...the water was pretty shallow and we ended up getting what i referred to as rock enemas and/or rock suppositories in some cases - at the very least, we received plenty of rock spankings... rough on the rear in many parts of the river! some of those little rapids were feisty and a little painful, but that produced a lot of the laughter. us yelling "OW!" down the river with every rock smack, stuff like that. luke and max are lighter than the rest of us, so they went a little faster than we did. if they got too far ahead, they just hung on to a big rock or a low-hanging tree branch and waited for us to get there. when it was time to get out, i was surprised we'd been in as long as we had. we decided not to go again - greg's back was tired of being in that position, which we all understood. we'll go again next time. when we asked the boys what their favorite thing of the week was, they all said tubing and rock hopping. =) we love it that they love that kind of thing. it's just time together and time doing simple things. and the simple things are what matter. after tubing, we went to a creek spot we'd visited last time we were in the area. lots of rocks to climb on and water to jump over. SO relaxing for us and fun for those boys! went on up the mountain to the tennessee/north carolina state line...then home for grilling those burgers and relaxing after all the hard work of our relaxation. haha!! had a great supper together on the deck again, overlooking those beautiful mountains. then back inside to just lay around the rest of the evening. we're just sitting there and greg says, "there's something in the trash out there.." i was hoping he wasn't going to make blake go out right then to put the lid back on, etc., and he didn't. and were we all ever glad - the next thing greg said was "it's a bear!" and it WAS a bear. a big black bear that pulled the trash can up out of the cord that held it to the cabin and carried it to the front yard to go through it. and go through it he did. (next morning when i went to clean up after him, there wasn't much to do!!) we held the flashlight and peeked at him through the window but i couldn't get a picture that satisfied me so i decided to step out on the porch (idiot) to get a better one. i held the door open with one hand and stretched out far as i could - used the zoom and just aimed the camera his direction. then i'd run in the house to see what i got. hilarious, so stupid, and it made me n-e-r-v-o-u-s. but i got my picture. next morning, we cleaned up, packed up and headed for NC and nanny and pop's for our 2nd week..