Bears.....Oh My!

I haven't been posting a lot the last few days because I've been on a little trip to Gatlinburg with my family! We left on Friday and came back on Monday. It was so much fun, and I can't wait to share all of my pictures with you. One of my favorite things to blog about is traveling :)

And just so you're warned, these posts are going to be long and detailed because I love having them to look back on!

We left early Friday morning and stopped at Cracker Barrel for breakfast. We do that every trip!

Then after driving for a little while, we came across a Sonic, and I convinced my family to stop! I've heard such good things about Sonic's drinks, and I've always wanted to try it out since we don't have any up north! I got the strawberry slush, and it was SO good. I see what all the fuss is about now!

Then we finally got to Pigeon Forge, which is the town right outside Gatlinburg. We stopped at the Outlet Mall on the way in. My favorite! I found a bunch of good deals too - love that!

We had a late lunch at a place called Calhoun's before getting to our chalet.

Here's a tour of where we stayed.....

Master Bedroom

I loved the sinks in the Master Bath!

My bathroom

My bedroom

Hot tub!

Then we headed into town for dinner. We ate at a place called the Best Italian. It was good, but well, interesting. We decided to order a medium pizza and a calzone. My dad and I decided to split the calzone because they said it was "pretty big". But what we didn't expect was it to be THIS big.....

We just got cheese in it, and when we cut into it, this is what was inside....

I love cheese, but this was too much. It almost made me sick all of the cheese in there. My dad and I didn't eat a whole lot of it because we were getting SO full of cheese. When we left, we both agreed that the thought of food made us sick.

After eating 3 pounds of cheese, we had to walk around a little to burn it off - ha! We went to some cute little shopping areas.

Then we headed back to our chalet to get in the hot tub! And this is where it gets really interesting....

We were sitting outside about to get into the hot tub, when my mom says that she heard something in the woods. I didn't believe her because she was all freaked out about bears, and I thought she was just imagining it.

But then I start to hear something too. We're looking up into the woods from our deck, and we see something moving. It was a bear! Of course we freaked out and ran inside when it started moving. We were watching it from inside the chalet, and it moved down the little mountain side, walked around the chalet, and started walking up our driveway. At one point, it was probably only about 30 feet away from us. Crazy! In all the excitement, we didn't have time to snap a picture of it, but was so freaky :)

Then we were afraid to go outside into the hot tub, so my dad came up with this fabulous idea....the Bear Blocker - ha!

The hot tub was up on the deck, but on the side of house. So when we were sitting in the hot tub, we couldn't see the front of the house or the steps to come up to the deck. So this was our solution :)

Since this post is getting kind of long, I think I'll go ahead and post some more about our trip later!