Heading to the mountains

Tuesday morning Lindee and I took Mallory, Clara, and Mason and headed to the mountains.  Our first stop was the Bush’s Visitor Center, where we ate sandwiches for lunch really quickly in the car, and then headed in to check out the exhibits.  The history of the company really was very interesting.  The history of the company pretty much was the history of the Bush family, and of course I loved looking at all the memorabilia.  Very cool.

The actual reason we headed to the Smoky Mountains was that I had won the lottery for tickets to see the synchronous fireflies. These particular fireflies were actually discovered in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park about 25 years ago, and I must have heard of them right away, because I’ve wanted to go ever since. This year they chose 1800 lottery winners to get in to see them; they had 22,000 applications. People were literally there from all over the world. It really was amazing. You couldn’t take pictures there, but I did get this one of our crew just before we got on the shuttle to head out.