The Apple Barn

Tim's favorite restaurant of all time has got to be The Apple Barn in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. I have yet to meet the preacher who loves fried chicken and sweet tea quite as much as Tim does, and The Apple Barn - according to Tim - has the best. In 5 days, we ate their 4 times. Does that tell you anything????

Aaron Smith, if you are reading this, then let me say that we will know we're in Heaven when we're all eating at The Apple Barn together. Yes, Tim is convinced that The Apple Barn is going to cater The Marriage Supper of the Lamb. And he believes that fried chicken is going to be the fruit on the trees in Heaven.

"When we all get to Heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be."

More Easter Egg Hunt Pics: CPBC

Does anyone remember the concluding scene from the movie Steel Magnolias from the 1980's? Our church's Easter Egg Hunt is so reminiscent of that! Enjoy these pictures from myself and Larry Harrell from a few Sundays ago....

Above, Tim hands out gospel tracts to each of their children to put in their baskets and bags.

Below, I'm directing the chaos. Or at least attempting to!

On your mark...

Get set....

Release the hounds!

Breakfast

One of our family traditions when we go to the Smoky Mountains is eating big breakfasts in the morning before we hit the mountains. Christopher's favorite pancake restaurant is Flapjacks. I hope all of you get the humor out of this video when you hear about what all came with my breakfast from the "healthy" section of the menu...

One of the more unexpected cool things we encountered on our Smoky Mountain adventure came when we stopped by the Oconaluftee Visitor Center. Behind the center was the most amazing little historical village from the pioneer days of the area. It was free to walk through, and proved to be a great history lesson for the five of us.

They had real apple trees just like the pioneers grew, and an apple house where the apples were stored. There was an actual garden growing the herbs and plants that the settlers grew, and fences still existed where the animals had been kept. What we had to keep reminding ourselves was that these were not replicas of what was used...these were the actual buildings and fences and grounds where a pioneers family had lived and survived. Two national park historians had the jobs of keeping-up the village so that it didn't disintigrate.

Below was the real home of a settler family. The little building in the back was the meat house. Inside the cabin, a school group on a field trip was learning to make a real pioneer lunch in a dutch oven over the stove. The people who ran the exhibit were even making the kids wash their dishes after they ate just the way the pioneers did!

Below was the blacksmith house, where these women were showing us how to forge iron. Christopher was so very bummed that you had to be 10 to take a turn trying it: he turns 10 in just a few weeks.

Below, Anna learned about the hog house and the importance that hogs played to the pioneers. They could be valuable as a lot of meat, and they reproduced easily.

Christopher, John, and Tim watched one of the National Park historians work with the same woodworking tools to carve a piece of wood.

This man in the green hat knew absolutely everything about primitive life in Tennessee. He knew what kind of trees they made the shingles from, how long those trees took to grow, what every kind of tool was used for, etc. He was amazing, and we could have listened to him all day! The boys were enthralled.

Apple Blossoms

If you don't want to fight the crowds in Washington D.C. trying to see the cherry blossoms in the springtime, I recommend heading to Pigeon Forge and enjoying the apple blossoms. Our favorite spot to see them was at The Apple Barn, Tim's favorite restaurant. They were beautiful, and they smelled divine...

Throughout my posts about our trip to the Smoky Mountains, you'll see lots of cute pictures of our family and our adventures. But the most moving time for me - and for Tim - came as we toured the cemetery at the old primitive Methodist church building on the Cades Cove Loop. The building is a classic white church building in the country...very picturesque and heartwarming. As we ventured into the backyard of the church, we walked around the cemetery which had headstones dating back to the Civil War.

Some of the headstones were so worn that they were only the stumps of rocks, with no names remaining on them at all. We had the opportunity to share with the boys how nothing we do in this life will stand the test of time. History no longer even recorded who those people were or what they had done: only Heaven held the accounts of their names and accomplishments now.

But more moving to us were the plethora of infant headstones in the graveyard. As we began reading the headstones, it was like almost every person in it had died only a few days, a few months, or maybe a few years old....if they had even survived birth. It was sobering to see how much infant death the pioneers of that area had encountered. I left that cemetery looking differently at what mattered in life to us now. How easy I have it! And how misguided my priorities often are.

Tim, however took another perspective from the cemetery. He looked at all the headstones and saw how much those early residents of Cades Cove valued life, much more than our generation does. Even though so many of those babies were still-born, these settlers - who had no luxuries and very little money - spent their time and money buying and carving headstones for their deceased little ones. They grieved for these children, even the ones who had never taken a breath. Granted, today we have other forms of burial and cremation for similar situations which allow parents to appropriately grieve; however, living the age of abortion, it was a moving testimony to see those headstones as a monument that those people did what they could to show that they had valued those little lives. Although these mountain people were uneducated and technologically deficient, they sure could teach the people of 2012 a lesson or two about the sanctity of life...

We had never tried the Meigs Creek Trail. We only made it about 2 miles up the trail, when we got out the hiking guide and read that it was 'especially prone to rattlesnakes.' Ick. Nothing like having to walk through the woods and listen for rattles! Thankfully, the Lord kept the rattlers away, and we made it almost to the end. Seeing that the skies were turning dark, we decided to turn back. The thunder began to roll and the clouds darkened, and we prayed that we could get home before the rain. Amazingly, we got inside the van and buckled our seatbelts just as the rain began to pelt our windshield. We were CERTAIN that Jesus had answered our prayer and held-off the rain for us. It actually turned into a pretty bad storm, with pounding rain and hail. How thankful we were to be spared from being out in it!