Vacation Day 3- Wednesday

We had an early appointment with our Realtor on Wednesday morning at her AMAZING house in Brentwood (which we decided is the Beverly Hills of Tennessee). Most of the houses looked like mansions!! Not joking. I was a bit intimidated as we drove up in our teal conversion van with 4 rambunctious children inside. I threatened them with their lives before ringing the doorbell. Fortunately, she was enjoying Christmas company and her gorgeous house was stuffed to the gills with tents and people. She was very knowledgeable and had some properties picked out for us that we might be interested in. I had found her info a few weeks before by contacting the mission home and asking for a Realtor in the stake. The mission president's wife knew just the right gal. How handy is the church?!
After we gathered our gawking children (who were amazed by the sheer size of her home and all the nice electronics in every room of the house) we went to see some of the properties. None of them were quite right for us. I've come to the conclusion that we're pretty picky, really. Not too close to town or too far. No land restrictions. Just the right price. Just the right school district. On and on. But it did give us some knowledge about the area that has helped a lot. So we'll see if anything ever comes of it. I'd love to live in Tennessee. It's such a beautiful state. And who can resist the Smokey Mountains??? Not I.

Anyway, we wrapped it up a little sooner than we thought and, even though we had our hotel there for another night and hadn't planned to head south until morning, we figured we might as well get on the road and get to the beach that much sooner. So we took off at like 3 that afternoon. I played stewardess again and made and delivered everyone's lunches to their chairs while they watched a movie. We kept a large blue cooler stocked with food in front of Ethan's chair. I totally loved that van. If it just weren't so...GREEN. I joked that it was our traveling Christmas tree (since it was the holidays). We had dinner in our Christmas tree too and kept watching the miles roll by (you can imagine the money we saved from our envelope that day- eating all our meals in the car and no entertainment expenses). We finally started getting tired near Atlanta and booked a Priceline room for Macon (like Bacon with an M). It's not nearly as cool as it sounds. The hotel was by far the worst we stayed in the whole trip. The thumping car stereo in the parking lot was a firm clue that we were not dealing with the caliber of people that we'd been treated to so far. Jared made sure the van was locked up tight, all the curtains down on the van windows, and parked it right outside our window. It left us with a sour taste for Georgia in our mouths. But, no biggie, it was just a stopping point on the way to our awesome destination.