Roadtrip

Get out your map.
(I was a good navigator. Darn good.)

It's roadtrip time.
So we drove back from Utah on a Sunday. It was about a 20 hour trip and we got in around 7 in the morning. On Monday we did some laundry and Brennan worked. On Tuesday we both worked and we packed yet again. We left Tuesday night for a 24 hour car ride to North Carolina. Talk about back to back trips. I wondered if we'd survive...but we did, and had a mighty fine time along the way. We counted how many states we hit between the two trips, I can't remember now, hang on I'll ask Brennan...11 for me, but Brennan got 12. In just one week we got to be in 11 different states, kinda crazy but it was pretty cool.

Originally I wanted to get pictures of all the state signs, but unfortunately I slept through half of them and far too many were in unsafe locations so we couldn't stop and get out. Here are a few we did capture though.
3 out of 12? Wow, kind of pitiful.

We got of a random exit, I'm not even sure what state we were in, but it just happened to be Harding St. It may have been because it was in the middle of the night, but we thought it was pretty exciting.
The really great thing about this road trip was that we weren't in too big of a hurry. We had to pick Grant up in Raleigh and we were ahead of schedule so we got to keep stopping at places that might be cool. Usually we ended up driving around until we decided we weren't going to find whatever we happened to be looking for, but even that was fun. One stop that was kind of a flop was at super old tobacco plantation. It probably would have been neat if we had enough time to do the tour, but we were absolutely NO good at the self-guided tour.
But we still got a picture. :)

By far the best stop was in a town called Mt. Airy. My dad texted me after we left and told me this town was on our route and it was the filming location of The Andy Griffith Show. It's the real life Mayberry!!! I was pretty excited about stopping. It was so much fun to see all the places I could recognize from the show.
Andy's house. You couldn't look around inside without making reservations to stay the night there.
The courthouse.
So there's a funny story about this picture. Brennan was asked to take a picture of a couple at sitting at the sheriff's desk, so he did. Well then the woman saw him doing this pose and thought it was just the greatest and made a comment about it. Then a few minutes later we see her run over and do the same thing and make her husband take a picture. I thought that was pretty amusing.
We even got to meet Andy and Opie. :)
This was really the farthest I've ever been out east excluding New York. It was beautiful. We tried to capture it from the car as well as we could, but it doesn't do it justice. Especially when an incredibly dirty windshield gets in the way. :)
We decided to take a different route back home and went through Tennessee. I am so glad we decided to do that. We got to go through the Great Smoky Mountains which were incredible. I would love to go back someday and really enjoy them. It was just good to see as much of this country as we possibly could.

Brennan has been a huge fan of a band called Ingram Hill for years now. He found out that they were doing a free outdoor concert in Louisville, Kentucky on the day we were headed home. Pretty lucky for us. It wasn't exactly the environment that we imagined, or one we would hope for but the music was really good and we were glad we got the opportunity to see them live.
Brennan even got to meet the lead singer.
There we are in Louisville.

It really was a fun trip. Exhausting. But so great to be able to spend so much time together and do as many fun things as possible. It was a perfect way to end our summer.