daily life

Travel Hibernation

/ Chris and Angie / Leave a comment

Each year, as the temperatures drop and days get shorter, we tend to, quite literally, make plans to hibernate for the winter. All the heavy blankets come out, the curtains get drawn, and we spend a few months focusing on projects at home. Usually, by mid-March, we are crawling in our skin ready to get out again. We live in Alabama, so generally spring comes early and the weather just begs for us to go explore!

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One of the brief moments this spring where it wasn’t absurdly wet..So you know we hit the trail! 

Somehow, 2019 did not get the memo. Is has been cold, dreary, rainy, and every combination of the three this spring, and we have definitely felt the effects in the form of a ” why don’t we stay in this weekend” funk. Don’t get us wrong, we enjoy the break (and our bank account loves it more), but it certainly feels like a hibernation that is out of our control.

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Most of our hikes have looked like this. Eerie, damp, and great if you’re in a horror film!

Chris’s office recently moved to a location closer to where we live, and Angie finally got approved to work-at-home again after taking a promotion last year that required her to go back to the office for training. So we have been completely living it up as home-bodies despite our normal desire to get out and explore. We’ve at least taken advantage of the time at home to make some much needed improvements with a new dining room table and curio, plus some other updates in other rooms and lots of work done outside as well.

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(We’re very proud to have a nice, adult looking dining room, indulge us in this one)

At some point during this pathetic excuse for spring, we decided to salvage what we could and got a membership at our local zoo. We absolutely love the zoo, but with so many other places we want to visit, we usually only make it over once a year to volunteer at their halloween event. It’s been a few years since we went as regular guests so we have really enjoyed seeing all the new expansions and exhibits. So between the zoo and a couple of small local hiking trails, we’ve managed to still enjoy being out and about without having to plan or cancel due to weather.

We even had a little staycation in March and hosted Angie’s parents for a few days of local tourism. We made a day trip to Atlanta to see the aquarium there, went to the zoo, and tried a few new restaurants around town. We had planned to get away to the mountains or beach, but the days we had off had terrible weather forecasts, so we knew it would be easier to stay home and do things strategically timed around the rain. It still worked out nicely, time with family is still a vacation, even if you aren’t going anywhere.

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We got out of the state! If only for a few hours, it still counts!

 

Still, we are so excited to emerge from hibernation. It’s slowly coming, and thanks to a big trip in June, we hadn’t budgeted for much this spring anyway, so it hasn’t been a total loss. We aren’t usually big on travel during the summer months, but this year is most likely going to prove to be an exception, for no other reason than to catch up after this late start!

Bucket List: Spur of the Moment Vacay

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This summer took quite a while to pick up speed it seems, we didn’t get out much during the first of the summer due to colder and rainier than usual climates… So once we got started, we really took the bull by the horns and have had a blast making up for a dreary summer this fall!

My parents were taking a fall vacation too, and so on their way back, we decided to meet them for a few days in Chattanooga, TN. We couldn’t leave without going to the aquarium, and with my love of everything underwater, I was definitely loving it!

My muscle man was super excited about the penguin exhibit, and he had lots of fun making the penguins chase his hand down the glass! Those little guys were super fast, I barely got a good shot at all haha!

 

And of course, there were sharks!  We stumbled on the big tank while they were doing a fish feeding show with a diver in the tank, so the fish were super active and we were able to watch from a side window since we didn’t much care for watching the diver, we just wanted to see the fishies!!

But my favorite was the jellyfish exhibits!!

 

 

 

Quite an enjoyable little weekend trip for me and my muscle man, and definitely helped make up for the rather blah start to our summer… So at least we were able to end the warmer weather season on a high note!  (We’re not tied to school schedules, so “summer” for us runs from when you pack the sweaters away until you break them back out again =P So this mid-October trip makes our summer list haha! )

Bucket List: SCUBA Diving (again)

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This year has really been quite an adventure for my muscle man and I! This is really more of a ‘bucket list’ item for him as I’ve already checked it off mine… I’ve been a certified diver for 13 years now, but had gotten out of practice since I didn’t have anyone to go with until now! So even though  I was a little worried about diving into such an expensive hobby (pun intended =P) I’m really glad my muscle man decided to get certified!

The best thing about him deciding to get into scuba is that we actually live about 15 minutes away from a great little quarry that’s been flooded and turned into a dive location. It’s actually the place I took my check out dives when I got certified(it’s like the road test when you get a driver’s license, you have to pass a written test, but then you have to go on several dives with your instructor before you can scuba dive on your own). And as fate would have it, it’s also where my muscle man wound up going to do his check out dives too!

I went with his group for a bit of a refresher for myself, there were actually quite a few parents of kids in the group doing the same thing haha. My muscle man’s instructor decided they would do the required 4 scuba dives in one day, which was quite exhausting, but really fun!

Since that trip was mostly more about testing skills, and since we had a really big group, we didn’t get to see much of the quarry. But since it’s only 15 minutes from our house, we decided a few weeks later to go back just the two of us and get in a few more dives and have some fun.  =)

This trip was a lot more relaxed, and it was great to get into the water with my muscle man and swim around for a bit, and explore some of the less explored areas around the quarry. It goes down really deep, something like 180feet, but we stayed shallow since there was this terrible thermocline (level of freezing ass cold water) at about 40′.

So aside from dipping down into that cold area to check out a wrecked car or something, we stayed shallow and just took our time checking things out. As we were swimming around, I noticed the absolute coolest thing I’ve seen while diving in freshwater… jellyfish… no really… A JELLY freaking FISH… In freshwater! I tried to get a photo of it, but without a macro filter or any advanced settings on my little point and shoot 35mm underwater camera, a blurry little smudge is the best I could do =P

It was still quite a fun little day out at the quarry, but we still haven’t fully explored all that’s in this little hole. So I’m sure that we will check it out again at some point, if for nothing else than to just keep our skills up between more adventurous dive trips. =)

Bucket Listing 2013

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We’re filling our bucket quick quickly haha! My muscle man decided to jot down a list of ‘bucket list’ items he’d like to do in 2013, and since his birthday comes at the first of the year, he took advantage of the warm-ish weather to go ahead and (almost) knock one of the items off the list! He really wants to go exploring in a cave this year, and we had heard there were some ‘off the map’ ones at Desoto State Park in Alabama. So after a little sweet talking by me to the park ranger, we had our (literally!) hand drawn map in hand and off we went! No such luck in find the real cave, but we did get half-way there with a (man made, but several hundred years ago) cove/overhang in  the rock wall =D

First though we went to the park’s namesake waterfall, desoto falls, which has a man-made dam just before cascading over a gorgeous rock face… Here’s the view you get from the normal, easy to walk from the parking lot overlook: (I only took my 50mm lens with me, since I knew we’d be in possibly treacherous areas and didn’t want to risk my expensive–not to mention heavy to carry on a several mile hike–lens…so my angles were quite limited)

And then here’s  the view from the mile or so hike that we thought would take us down to the river’s edge after swinging toward the waterfall (it didn’t.. but still, very glad we took the detour, this view was absolutely amazing!!!) If you look really closely you can see little people off to the left side, that’s where the first photo was taken.

So, slightly disappointed that the trail didn’t take us down to the water after the gorgeous overlook, we tried again to figure out where the trail the park ranger had drawn for us was… We finally found it, but were way too tired to hope that we were right and continue on down river and away from our car… Instead we walked around between the two trails, which gave us some really amazing vantages and it’s also where we discovered the little welsh cave (named apparently because welsh settlers carved them, I think I remember the ranger telling us).

See that little person at the bottom left? That’s my muscle man, about 20 feet away from the rock face that goes up so far you can’t see the sunlight!! I wish I would have had my regular lens to really capture how huge it was! I was also concerned my battery wasn’t going to last, so I didn’t take many photos in case we did find the big cave and I wanted to use a battery-draining flash to light photos in it…

And here’s the whole expedition group!! We even brought the dog along with us, he absolutely loved exploring! =D Granted, he was so excited when we finally got home from our journey haha, his poor little paws were exhausted after 2 days of hiking!!

From the very back of the cave to the opening, I’d say it was probably a good 30-40 feet? Lol I’m really bad with distances, but suffice to say it was quite large! I think all three of us sat down on that large rock to the left with plenty of room to spare… The 50mm lens really didn’t do it justice, but I was very glad to have a lighter weight camera than my other lens, which is a beast…

Oh, and then we decided to stay for the night because my muscle man wanted so badly to find the cave, and we figured that since we had found the unmarked trail that was close enough to merit staying, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell him no on his birthday trip!! But that’s another story for another day =D

Geeky Wednesday: The Big Rock

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Since my fabulous muscle man took a few extra days off from work last week to celebrate my birthday and the 4th, we decided to go out on Tuesday for some fun exploring! =) Not wanting to get too far away from home, we chose to run up the road to where we’re getting married =D The muscle man has only been once, and the times I’ve been it’s been all business, so neither of us has really had a chance to see the whole property, and it’s pretty massive! Just adjacent to the chapel is a summer camp, so there’s plenty of trails and such that the campers use, and a natural rock face for climbing too!

But we started our little journey over on the chapel side of the property, getting a closer look at what’s left of the old home site that used to be on the property. (At least I think that’s how the story goes… Our tour guide-the property’s curator and manager-wasn’t there, he took a long holiday weekend too!) Whatever the story behind these little half walls and chimney, and the well next to it, they are gorgeous! Definitely hoping some of our wedding guests find their way over to it, it’s only a little way behind the reception building =)

From there we headed out to the lake, and to the little boat house. It’s for storage for the campers, and an arts and crafts house too! If you’ve ever watched one of those 90’s summer camp movies, this place would have been right at home. I’m so jealous there wasn’t a camp like this where I grew up =P

The muscle man wanted to bring the dog along for our little outing, and he loved it! It was definitely more of a workout than what the dog is used to though… See that rock jutting out from the corner of that second photo?

This rock.. no biggie, looks pretty close, right?

Well we had heard there was a trail that took you over to it, so off we went! Luckily it was a pretty wide path, thanks to the campers, but mostly, it was far enough away from the water that there was excellent tree cover, and shade! We went mid-morning, but it was still absurdly hot! But after passing the dam (which was super pretty and had this amazing iron release valve at the bottom) we finally made it to the rock, and found nice little arrows directing us the safe way to scale to the top!

Remember that boat house/crafts center?

At this point, I was really regretting the decision to leave the 50mm lens on my camera, instead of my more versatile 18-200… but I was still able to get some fun shots!

The dog was so brave, and surprisingly nimble on the rocks too! He just kept hopping along like he’d been up there a hundred times, he only hesitated occasionally when he was about to step onto a narrow ridge that had a deep drop on the other side =P

And there’s that 50mm problem creeping in… Combined with the fact I was shooting from the hip, and that the dog was moving… But still, I mostly got his snout in the shot, and I just love that DOF, so I’m keeping it!

I didn’t take my tripod either, so I was really pleased to be able to get a shot of both of us on top of the big rock, despite the fact you can’t really tell we’re so high up on a massive rock, sitting feet away from a sheer dropoff…

 

Then it was time to head back, since we didn’t exactly come prepared to repel off the rock, we really had no reason to keep baking ourselves in the insane heat, so down we went.

But I was able to convince my tired muscle man to go a bit out of our way to go to the bottom part of the rock face for a few photos =D I love rock faces, they make for the most amazing backdrops! It’s really a shame the rock is so far away or I’d probably wind up over there on my wedding day for some pics (even though supposedly there’s a golf cart path to it, it’s still quite a bit away from the ceremony, and it’s going to be hot enough in the middle of August without running all over the place haha)

Overall it was a fabulous little excursion, it was great to be able to go all over the property and have the chance to find some great spots for pictures for the wedding, but even more impressive was that rock! I’ve been to the mountains in TN and such before, but this is just a massive rock, jutting out near a gorgeous lake… With no rails or anything to keep you in a certain area. I can only imagine how much fun the campers have repelling off of it, but I was quite content to keep both my feet firmly planted thankyouverymuch =P

Geeky Wednesday: Geek Roadtrip

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 After visiting my bestie in Virginia for a few days, it was time for me and the fiance to start heading back towards Alabama, and with our car fitted for us to sleep somewhere along the way, we quite literally had the world in front of us and no plans =) So when the muscle man suggested we stop in Chattanooga, which was on our route, I leaped at the chance to go a little out of our way and go to Gatlinburg instead for the night! So off we drove, and we got there a little before sunset so we were able to enjoy the street life (read: tourist traps) along the main drive in town.

Totally my kind of street food! We had to stop and get some fresh made taffy, and candy too! We even found gummy penguins, we had to get some of those because the muscle man’s brother loves penguins! We only got a snap of the penguins from the cell, so it’s crap quality but it’s still fun!

That was mostly all we did Monday night, since it is still off-season most of the stores closed early so we went off in search of a safe place to stay for the night and pulled our curtains shut for the chilly evening

I should have packed us an extra blanket, it got cold! But the curtains did a fabulous job keeping out lights from the parking lot we found to stay in =D

We both wound up waking up around 5 am freezing cold, so when my muscle man wanted to turn the car on for some warmth I figured we should just drive into the national park to watch the sunrise! It’s illegal to park there overnight, but I figured watching sunrise then napping a few more hours would probably either a) be ok, or b) not be noticed by any passing rangers, as hikers leave their cars for day hikes all the time… In any case,  no one tapped on the glass, and the sunrise was totally worth it! Super fun to watch a beautiful sunrise over the mountains from the backseat of the car haha!

A few hours later the view I had chosen was just as lovely, and had that gorgeous haze the smoky mountains are famous for.

More Mountain photos to follow, but I figure that’s quite enough for one post! And today is about the geeky part, which is my fabulous road trip ready car! I’m so happy with my curtains that are going to let us do so much more traveling now =) It requires a little sacrifice on our part (no shower, no potty! lol) but for a one night weekend trip or a “just passing through” stop on our way somewhere else, it’s perfect!