Monday, May 6 – Wednesday, May 8

We spent the next two days on the lake. Dad and RJ worked in the morning and then we would all pile in the boat and have a nice long surf session before docking the boat and going out for supper. 

On Wednesday, RJ and I left very early in the morning for Nashville. Our plan was to stop for a meeting half way, drive to the capitol, then head back to the lake house and spend the afternoon on the lake with Dad, Mom, Jessie, and Ken and Whitney who were flying in around noon. 

Of course, things didn’t happen according to plan! RJ’s meeting lasted longer than it was supposed to. We had an hour and a half to get to Nashville which was more than enough time- we were only 40 miles away. But, there was road construction on the freeway and traffic was down to one lane. But also, right when we left from RJ’s meeting, there was a crash on the freeway so they shut the entire freeway down. Now we had to take a back road with the rest of traffic trying to get to Nashville. To make matters even worse, this backroad was a school road and it was 3pm, and elementary through high school were getting out for the day. So there was even more traffic. After an hour and a half of sweating profusely from how hot it was, we had traveled a mere 10 miles and had made it from one entrance of the freeway to the other and through the stop and go traffic but there was no way we were going to make it to the capitol that day. We had another 30 miles to drive and the capitol had closed 10 minutes ago. 

Defeated, we turned around. We were supposed to head to Knoxville to meet the fam for supper but Ken and Whitney had missed two flights and weren’t getting in until 3 in the morning. We couldn’t get a hold of Dad and Mom because they were on the lake and didn’t have signal. 

At this point, we would hardly make it to Knoxville in time for supper anyway. Which was quite sad because this is THE BEST burger joint any one of us has ever been to. We found it one of the last times we were in Tennessee and we had all been looking forward to going back for the past year. 

We finally made contact with the ‘rents and decided that they would go a different day with Ken and Whit. We took a detour on the way back and stopped in to see our good friends Rob and Janice who had just moved from Chico. They live in gorgeous country!

We had supper with them before heading back to the lake house. We arrived back almost 12 hours later than we had planned for the day but not every day goes how you want it to. We have learned to be very flexible with our plans on the these trips and roll with the punches. It was 11:30pm and I had to pack and RJ had to finish up some work so he could take off the following day for the next leg of our trip.

~em