Gingerbread anyone???

This last week Mike had to go to Asheville, NC for a conference. The kids and I decided it would be fun to drive over there and spend the weekend with him. It was a long drive, but I am so glad we went. The first half of the drive was pretty slow going and boring, but once we hit the mountains it was nice. I miss the mountains so I was in heaven. We got there Friday afternoon and Mike took us to the hotel where the conference was being held. I wish we could have stayed here, but it would have been pretty expensive. This place was amazing.

They had a massive display of gingerbread houses there, which turns out was from the national gingerbread competition. This wasn't even half of them.

Here are some of my favorites.

I wish I'd thought to change the settings on my camera for some of these. The lighting was really bad so some pictures turned out really blurry. But the details of some of these houses, like the one in this picture, were just amazing. If you look close you will see a broken egg on the table. Seriously, I wonder how long it took them to make some of these.

I would really like to know how they made the books.

After we looked at all the gingerbread houses we stopped and took a picture in Santa's sleigh. You can't see Santa because Mike is standing in front of him. Rude! :)

This is actually a big fireplace. There was another one on the other side of the room that had a fire in it and people were sitting around it in chairs just relaxing.

The next day after Mike finished for the day we went out and found a park for the kids to play at. It was pretty cold. We were hoping the snow would have stuck for longer than it did, but it was gone before we had a chance to get out. The ground was still wet though and so was all the play equipment at the park. Jacob was wet and cold, cold, cold by the time he climbed back into the van. (Lizzie fell asleep soon after we left the hotel and slept the whole time we were out.) We decided to pick up some dinner on the way back to the hotel and then take the kids swimming. There was a Starbucks next to the Chinese place we stopped at and Mike got us some hot chocolate. Starbucks has some dang good hot chocolate. We decided to let Jacob have some and we didn't get it back after that. He kept hugging it and saying, "it's gooooood."

Once we got back to our room and finished eating we took the kids down to the pool. Mike had taken Jacob down the night before and he got to sit in the hot tub. So when we got down there this time, he went right for it. He sat down in the water and just soaked up the warmth. Mike tried to get him out to go swim with him and he refused. He had to drag him out and into the pool. After he got some good exercise in we let him get back into the hot tub. Lizzie liked the hot tub too. When it was time to go we dried them off and wrapped towels around them, but they both kept trying to jump back in the water. They did not want to leave the pool. Once we got dressed again we bundled back up and went for a drive. Lizzie couldn't move much and she could barely see. She just sat there not quite knowing what to do. Both kids ended up falling asleep. When Lizzie fell asleep this is what she looked like, only with her eyes closed. I couldn't stop laughing. She seriously didn't move at all. But I don't think she minded much that she couldn't move as long as she was warm. We were planning on going to the nature reserve they have there and seeing the "Winter Wonderland" thing they had advertised. When we got there we could see that it was lit up, but there was no way to get in. There were no cars there and all the doors were locked. We were pretty disappointed. It was supposed to be from 6-9pm. We got there at 7pm. Don't know what was up with that. So, we decided instead to go see the Biltmore Inn that we heard so much about. It's Americas biggest mansion that they turned into a hotel. There was a whole community built around it. We couldn't actually see the hotel without a ticket. I guess they light the entire thing up with candles at night and you have to pay through the nose to see it. haha. Next year we might go back and see it. It sounds pretty cool. Anyhoo, it was worth it just to go see the community next to it. It was all lit up and on our way there we got to see a nice firework display. It was awesome. It was too dark to get many pictures but I did manage to get a couple that were not blurry.

I was wishing we had more time to see everything, but alas, we had to head back early this morning to make it to church on time. We will definitely be making trips there in the future. We can't wait to go back.