According to Damien a day in Ober Gatlinburg is like a day in Hell...

...and based on our experience Saturday I might agree with him. Although past experiences there have been fun, we definitely know never to go back on December 26th.

We rented a cabin in Townsend, TN with my family over Christmas. It was great. I'll write more about that later.

On Sunday we leave our cabin at 11am and drive the 45 minutes to Gatlinburg.
A 10 minute drive up the mountain to Ober Gatlinburg - no parking.
A 10 minute drive back down the mountain.
About 20 minutes to find a parking spot so we can take the Aerial Tramway up the mountain.
30 minutes waiting to buy tickets for the Tram
30 more minutes to finally get on the Tram.

Finally make it up! The place is packed. A few of my brothers head off to ski. My dad is really excited about taking the boys snow tubing.

Sooooo...he and my sister stand in line for an hour an a half. My dad just keeps thinking how fun it will be to watch the boys do it. They barely get tickets to the last run of the day. Meanwhile we've just been sitting around trying to keep the boys from going crazy. And after the 2 hours it took just to get up the mountain it was not an easy task. So we're exited that all that waiting was worth it and we got the tickets.

We sign waivers, get the little "safety" talk and are on our way. Emily and I go first. Then Pops comes down with Caiah. I can hear him laughing. They are going fast! Then their tube hits these rubber mats that are there to slow them down and the tube flips. Poor Caiah is thrown out and does a face plant into the ice. It was sort of surreal to watch. I was sorting asking myself "Did that really happen?" I was actually happy to see him crying and not knocked out or something.

He is screaming and bleeding everywhere. They call ski patrol (which are the paramedics) out to make sure he's ok and they make us go to their office to check him out more. I was pretty sure he wasn't seriously hurt.

So, the entire day of waiting and it ends like this. It was sad. My dad felt horrible (although it wasn't his fault). He, Emily and Orin kept tubing while we had Caiah checked out. I don't think it was much fun for them though. Even Orin kept asking how Caiah was. I was glad they gave Damien's, Caiah's and my money back at least.

As we walked to the office to have him checked out, he was screaming, face all bloody. It was very strange to have people staring as we walked. I can't imagine having some sort of deformity and having people stare all of the time.

Ironically, about the same time, Ryan had fallen while snowboarding and another skier had hit him and put a HUGE gash in his arm. He and two of my other brothers were at the ski patrol office getting Ryan's arm patched up. We found out later that they were there at the same time as us and had heard a baby screaming. Andrew even said that he was thinking how much the kid sounded like Micaiah.

We rounded everyone up and attempted to leave...only to find out that the line to take the Tram down was over an hour long. Poor Caiah had fallen asleep on Damien. We decided to just wait in a little lounge for a while to let the line go down. Caiah slept, and the rest of the clan played darts and ate. After about 1 1/2 hours we go to get in line which is a little shorter. Forty-five minutes later we're finally going down.

We make it to our car and drive back to the cabin. About 5 minutes from the cabin Caiah starts complaining about his tummy and then throws up. So at this point, Damien and I are going to take him to the hospital. I had always heard that if your child hits their head to make sure the aren't tired or vomiting. Well, we attributed his sleeping before from his missing a nap, but after the vomiting we were worried.

This is when it's nice to have a brother who is a Doctor. He gently explained that Caiah probably had a mild concussion, but if we went to the hospital they would probably just send us back and say to watch him. Aaron check him out (eye dilation and all of that stuff). Caiah was acting normally and seemed fine. We asked him how old he was, who his brother was and who was his favorite Car. :-) So we didn't go but just kept an eye on him and woke him up during the night to check him out and ask him questions.

So, this is him laughing as they went down the hill. My mom was taking pictures of the fun.


Crying right after it happened. The ski patrol guy was trying to check him out but Caiah sure wasn't making it easy for him. You can already see his lips swelling up.

This was an hour or two later while we waited for the Tram. It's hard to tell, but he totally looked liked he was stung in the lips or something. They were so swollen it was sort of cartoonish.

It looks like there is blood on his face, but there isn't. Those are just little scratches from the ice. They said it's called ice burn. Now they have all scabbed over and he just sort of looks like he ate chocolate and got it all over his face. The swelling is pretty much gone. I'm surprised that it went down in two days considering how big they were.

And just so you don't forget what his cute face looks like. This was the day before.

Hangin' with Aunt Emily.