We made our annual trip to Blowing Rock, NC to get our Christmas tree. This year we decided to go a week earlier than normal and that was such a good idea for several reasons. The second weekend in December seems to always fall on someone’s birthday (McKinley’s, Betty’s) and we hate to miss the parties so we headed up to the mountains on December 5th and extended our trip to be two nights instead of 1. It snowed this weekend, a rare treat, but one of the main reasons we trek to the mountains year after year, to get some of the cold weather that should accompany the holidays. And come to find out – the day after we left they closed the road into Blowing Rock for rock slides so our trip would have been much longer (and 3 hours was about max for Cailee) then usual. So this year, timing was everything and we nailed it.
We stayed at the Ridgeway Inn and it was A-OK. (I include that because we are still in search of our favorite place to stay, but this one met all the standard criteria so no complaints although I wouldn’t say the hunt is over). The Green Park Inn, which does hold some memories for us, in addition to being haunted, is sadly closed. But I digress.
When we arrived in Blowing Rock, I realized that I forgot Cailee’s hat and gloves, not good considering it was snowing, very cold and windy. It was 27 degrees and the windchill had to put it at negative something (that might be an exaggeration but it was bitter). By the time it was all said and done we had spent nearly 100 bucks getting hats, gloves and more for all of us. Clearly, us city folks were just not prepared for this kind of weather. But that’s, after all, why we go to the mountains to get the tree.
Speaking of trees, because we were a few days earlier this year, the selection of trees was so large that we had quite a time finding a tree. In fact, the first tree we chose, they wouldn’t even cut down because they said it was not nice. Ha! I have never heard of such a thing. The farmer actually had to hand pick one for us. The trees were huge, I was worried we were going to have the chevy chase 15 foot tree in a 9 foot house. But I think we literally have the perfect Christmas tree this year.
Cailee didn’t seem to mind the cold – although she didn’t exactly appreciate getting all the gear on – she loved the snow and tromped around in her pink boots (a last minute Target find). She even tried to eat a little bit.
The only challenge we had this year was staying in a one room hotel room with a baby and trying to get her to go to sleep – was more trying than we anticipated. We learned by night two that the trick is to get her really worn out and then she will go to sleep – of course Mom and Dad were zonked too.
All in all, its one for the books, we had a great time and have plenty of pictures to remember it by.
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