Our Third Anniversary

 We spent ten days in Gatlinburg, Tennessee in the Great Smoky Mountains!  Daniel stayed at Gigi and Grandaddy's (his first time without us!) and had lots of fun, too!

  We spent a lot of time just walking around Gatlinburg, enjoying the scenery!

  We shopped in several stores, but our favorite was Cooter's Garage!...

  Ben Jones (the actor who played Cooter in The Dukes of Hazzard) has a museum with an example of every Dukes of Hazzard toy ever made!  Here are just a few of the many General Lee's!...

  Lane and Alan had lots of fun looking through all the toys and identifying them as "I have that one!"...

  Cooter also has props and costumes from the show displayed!...

  You can also pose with the General...

  Rosco's police car...

  Daisy's Jeep...

  and, of course, Cooter's tow truck!

  We also went to Boyd's Bear Barn!  This is the largest teddy bear store in the world!...

  There are lots of Boyd's bears for sale, and you can also make/stuff/dress your own teddy bear!...

  Lane had lots of fun making her baseball teddy bear!

  We spent one day of our vacation in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park at Cade's Cove...

  We toured the old village and working grist mill (that runs off water from this stream)...

  and saw several deer during our drive!

  We played mini-golf twice during our trip!

  And we ate at the Hard Rock Cafe twice!

  Then we found out that a tree had fallen on our house while we had been gone,...

   so we drove all night (about nine hours each way) to see the damage for ourselves and get someone to remove the tree.  Then we headed back to Gatlinburg to resume our vacation!  Because we didn't want to miss...

  DukesFest!  The annual Dukes of Hazzard reunion was held at Bristol Motor Speedway in Bristol, TN (near the Virginia state line)!

  We were very excited about meeting the stars of the show and getting autographs!...

  Even though we were fairly close to the beginning of the line to get John (Bo Duke) Schneider's autograph, we waited for FOUR hours to finally meet him!....

  But check out how many people were behind us, and waited almost twice as long as we did!

  Lane always wanted to marry Bo Duke when she was little!  But then she met Alan and decided that he was the best husband in the whole world, so this lady got stuck with being Mrs. John Schneider!

  Finally!  We were able to meet Bo!

  ...and get him to autograph Lane's Dukes of Hazzard bank shaped like a General Lee that Grandy gave her when she was a little girl!

  He also autographed some photos and a General Lee model car for us!....

  ...And after every autograph, he looked up and flashed a big smile because so many people were trying to take photos of him!

  We also met Rick Hurst (Cletus Hogg)!  After we told him about the tree on our house and how we had driven 18 hours the day before to go home and then drive back to go to DukesFest, he said that we were true fans and *he* was glad to meet *us*!

  Because the lines were so long, we weren't able to meet Rosco, but we were able to see and wave at him!

  We also ran out of time to meet Daisy, but at least we got to see her from a distance!

  There was also a stunt show!  Original Dukes of Hazzard stunt drivers showed off how to drive on two wheels, jump over cars, and crash cars so that no one gets hurt!

  For the grand finale, Bo, Daisy, Rosco, Cletus, and Cooter sang "Just Some Good Ol' Boys"!  Shooter Jennings (son of Waylon) also performed!

  In addition to meeting the stars of the show, we had lots of fun looking at the car show with all the privately owned General Lees that people had driven to DukesFest (about 60!)...

and we went to a Mopar drag race at Thunder Valley Drag Strip (next to Bristol Motor Speedway)!

  Back in Gatlinburg, we saw a black bear near our hotel!

  And we dressed up to go to a nice restaurant for an early celebration of our anniversary!

  On the way back home, we stopped in Athens, TN and toured the Mayfield Dairy Farm!...

...We saw how they make and bottle their yellow milk jugs, how they make ice cream sandwiches & Brown Cows, and we even got to sample some ice cream! Yum!

We had a great time on our vacation, but we were excited to get back home and see Daniel!  We missed him a lot!

  On July 6th, Daniel had his first babysitter, and Momma and Daddy went on a date to Amerigo's!  After we got home, we celebrated with some of our wedding cake!!