Get Away Weekend

The family went to Pigeon Forge for a long weekend. We reserved three rooms at the Inn at the Christmas Place for Friday-Sunday. The Inn is gorgeous. The rooms are beautifully decorated and have lots of space with nice soft beds, although the pillows left something to be desired. When you walk into the lobby, there is a door man to greet guests and you're immediately but subtlely enclosed in the sounds and smells of Christmas, which you might think would be off-putting outside the Christmas season, but it draws you in and immediately makes you feel warm, toasty and comfortable.

There are two lobbies, an upper lobby where you check-in and a lower lobby where they have story time and visits with Santa in the evenings, along with milk and cookies.

They serve a full breakfast each morning and have about 4 differant coffee's all day in the lobby...including Barnie's Santa's White Christmas, which is one of my favorites.

Right next door is a Starbucks and the Flying Carousel Restaurant, both of which we frequented the first night.

We also had dinner at the Old Mill Restaurant on Saturday night....did some shopping...and took the boys to the new Adventure Quest, which is now in the previous Helicopter Museum location. Alden loved the laser game, where you had to crawl and jump your way through a room of lasers to try and get to the end without being hit.....we all tried this one and you could watch progress on the TV monitor outside the room...hilarious.

I have been wanting to start a Dept 56 Halloween collection for a couple years now and picked up my first two pieces this weekend...well one of them was actually Lemax, but I don't mind blending the two, as both have some awesome pieces. I told Alden to pick out which building he thought we should buy and he picked out a pirate ship, which was from the Lemax Spooky Town collection.

I added a sign and remembered that I had previously purchased a taxi driven by a skeleton...so we are on our way to building the collection to be displayed during October and of course our annual Halloween party. No rhyme or reason to the pieces I've chosen yet, but there will be by the time Oct rolls around.