Sewanee trip.

Two weekends ago, my family spent the weekend in one of my favorite places in the world - Monteagle/Sewanee. My dad's birthday was November 8th (hi dad! love you!) and so we assembled my brothers from Knoxville, their "friends that are girls", and ourselves on the Mountain.

We got in late Friday after a bit of traffic and had a dinner at Papa Ron's in Monteagle before heading to bed to get ready for a big day of hiking the next day.

The next morning started with Waffle House - a must on the Mountain and also a family tradition for any road trip:

After filling ourselves with grease, we hit one of my favorite hikes, Fiery Gizzard in the South Cumberland State Park:

(Jake and Ez)

(Blue Hole)

(Giant leaves everywhere)

(rare photo appearance from Jacob)

 (couple moment on the hike)

 (young people on the hike)

 (leaves were beautiful)

 (my parentals)

After the hike, a natural stop was the famous Dutch Maid Bakery for cookies. Dutch Maid is in Tracy City and is delicious.

 After filling up on sugar, we hit the road for the second hike of the day, Stone Door. The drive to Stone Door was particularly pretty:

 The hike itself leads to an overlook and then a "stone door", hence the name. Here's the overlook:

 And the "door" -

 We hit up my favorite Mexican, Mi Casa, for dinner before settling into the hotel room to watch LSU win over Bama (geaux tigers!).

The next day we woke up and got breakfast before hitting the road:

The Smokehouse -

We had an incident with a piece of concrete and our tire on the interstate in Nashville... the tire did not survive but amazingly, we had our on "saint" for All Saint's Sunday because a man stopped and changed our tire to our full sized spare in less than 5 minutes, where we couldn't even figure out how to get the spare off. We were back in business and home on time.

It was a great weekend of family and fun. Grateful for those moments.

In stinky brothers and gracious parents,