Young Couples Retreat

Every year our Young Families class goes on a weekend trip to Gatlinburg, TN. It's a nice way to relax and spend time with the young couples from church without the kiddos :) We stay in a huge chalet with lots of room for games and two TVs to please the football fanatics. This was our 5th time going and I was really excited. Every year except for the first trip, I've been with a baby, pregnant or breast feeding. Can I say breast on here? I hope they don't kick out my blog for being explicit...haha. Anyway, we left on Friday for the drive up. We stop for lunch and make a trip to Wal-Mart for groceries for the weekend. Our wonderful leader Kay always makes out a breakfast, lunch and snack menu, divides it up and each couple is sent in to buy their "list" of items. This sure does break down the craziness of shopping for everyone. This year we only had 6 couples go. The smallest group ever. The biggest group was last year and we had 20 couples go. Some of us had to share bedrooms with other couples and some even slept out in the living area on air mattresses. It was nice this year for everyone to have their own bedrooms. We usually spend the first night staying up late talking or playing games. Saturday is the same every year. Football. Football. And more football. The guys will sit and watch football all day until they need a potty break or something to eat. And then it's back to the same position. This gets really old for the ladies. I can't stand to sit around a watch sports all day. One game is enough. The chalet has two TVs. A huge big screen and a smaller one that sits on top. Both TVs are turned on different games. By 1:00 I was begging Derek and Curtis to let me watch some E!. No luck. Around 3:30 Andrew and Stephen came up with the idea to go ride Go-Carts. Much better than watching more football. We drove into Gatlinburg and found a place for the guys to ride. I thought it was a stupid way to spend $10. Go round and round a slick track for what? And it was raining. They enjoyed it though. Then it was time to hit the outlet malls. The guys least favorite part of the day. Lots of good finds!! That night we went to Calhoun's BBQ for dinner. It was SO good. They were out of their famous ribs, so most of us got their signature steak dinner. We even got free dessert for that reason. We stayed up late that night talking about our move to Chase Park. Going to be sad when we leave Parkway. Lisa brought a new game called 'Imagine If'. You have to go around the room and Imagine If someone was something or placed in a situation. We played with everyone even if they were asleep or didn't want to play. I think our favorite character was Curtis. He thought our game was dumb and he just made it all the more fun. We always stay up so late, but make so many memories with our friends from church. It's the trip I look forward to the most every year. Sunday we got up and had church (Andrew preached on our move and did a great job), packed and made our way back home. It was nice to be home with our babies and I'm already looking forward to the next retreat.