Opryland Hotel, Our Traditional Hike, and How I spent my NYE

Greetings!  It finally turned cold here.  My boys have worn shorts for the last couple of days and are disappointed they have to drag pants and jeans back out!

I left off at my December recap with Christmas.  Chad really spoiled me this year.  There have been years when we really don't exchange gifts and then there are years when we do.  We are a blessed family- Chad has a great job (granted, stressful with travel, etc) that allows our family to have more than what we need.  I never want to take that for granted.

As one of my "gifts" this year, Chad booked a night at the Opryland Hotel to see the lights.  Last December, Chad and I visited the hotel after we saw the Rockettes and I told him I would love to spend the night there during the holidays and take it all in.  Much to my surprise, he remembered my wish!  I like to think that this trip was my reward for being a solo parent all those weeks when he traveled!  An even bigger surprise was that the room he booked overlooked the Cascades garden.  As soon as I walked in, I could feel a calmness come over me (and the kids were even with us! LOL)
These two pictures were taken from our balcony.

While we were there, we met these guys.  They are members of the University of Louisville football team.  We walked up to four of them and asked for a picture then two more players ran over to get in!  We talked with them for a minute, wished them good luck, high fived them, then went on!  SO COOL!  They were such nice young men.  The Texas A & M players were also staying there but they weren't as clean cut and nice.  Both teams played in the Music City Bowl. 

We ate dinner at the hotel and walked the gardens pretty much the rest of the night.  The next morning, we walked again then went to Opry Mills, with the rest of Nashville, to get Carson some new shoes and check out any deals.  We left fairly quickly because it was so crowded and headed home.  It was a quick but wonderful way to reset after the Christmas rush.

We spent the day Monday taking down our Christmas decorations.  I didn't put up as much this year so it wasn't bad taking it all down.  I love Christmas but when it is over, it is over and I am ready to get the house back together.

On Tuesday, we went on our traditional hike to Laurel Falls.  This is Chad's favorite thing to do.  The hike itself is fairly short but there is a tough stretch of basically making your way down rocks to get to the falls.  It is worth it though!

 We take this picture every year to see how the kids have changed.  Chad has a better picture on his phone, but you get the idea!  He wants me to frame each year- I am thinking this may be a good Valentine's gift!

I don't remember much about Wednesday but I think I got caught up on laundry???  The kids played with their new Christmas toys and such and we watched our new friends, the University of Louisville football players, win their bowl game!

Thursday will be a day that goes down in the McMurray history books.

As I have written before, we have had problem after problem after problem with my Grand Cherokee.  Everything has gone wrong- the computer system, radiator, cruise control, you name it.  It spend over a month in the shop last winter, during the snows, because they couldn't figure out what was wrong with it.  We have had at least 10-12 recalls on the thing causing me to spend 10-12 days hanging out at the dealer.  As we were traveling to Nashville, Chad noticed that it was acting funny.  It kept switching gears and making funny noises.  We talked quite a bit on the way to and from Nashville and decided that the car was probably a ticking time bomb.  It was out of warranty, so anything that needed to be done outside of a recall would have to be paid for.  I told Chad that I would be fine with keeping it but I don't want to keep making payments on it PLUS spending who knows what on repair bills.  Heck, we had to put a new radiator in the darn thing before it was out of warranty! I told Chad how much I appreciated him taking care of me and my vehicle and caring enough to want to put us in a nice, safe ride.  Again, I am a blessed woman.  We could have kept the car and it may have been ok and it may not have been ok.

Chad drove an Explorer as his work vehicle for a while and put 130,000 miles on it and never had anything done to it except an oil change.  And he drove it hard.  We had looked at Explorers back in the summer when something was going on with the Jeep (ticking time bomb, I tell ya!) but didn't feel like we were getting good deals so we stopped.  While Chad was talking to his dad about all of this, CR mentioned looking in Atlanta.  He said that based on his research, you can get a car for around $3,000 cheaper than you can around here.  Since Chad had taken time off from work and the grandparents agreed to watch the kids, we found a couple of cars in Atlanta to look at.  We set out early NYE morning on a mission.

We found a silver explorer with all the options we wanted and talked via text with a dealer; however, he texted us about the time we got to Knoxville and said the car was being sold as he texted.  UGH.  We had already basically worked up some numbers with him and I was confident we were going that route.  While Chad drove, I surfed EVERY. FORD. DEALER. IN. THE.ATL. AREA for a silver or red explorer sport.  I found 2- one in each color.  I called the dealer that had the silver one and told him we were coming from TN and we would be there at 2.  We get there and the car isn't there.

I was so mad!  He said that it was at their sister dealer and that they were going to go get it and it would be there in about two hours.  If he knew we were coming to look at THAT VEHICLE, he should have had it there waiting for us.  They had red and silver fords there (not what we wanted) so we compared colors and determined that we liked the silver.  We told our sales guy that we would like to work up numbers for our jeep and requested to drive the silver once it arrived.  At this point it was about 3:00.  From 3:00-4:30, we talked numbers, went back and forth with management, and finally agreed.  I love car shopping with Chad because he is no dummy.  He made them take off the $99 nitrogen charge, $300 window tint charge (windows weren't even tinted), and dropped the paperwork fee by $100.  Finally, at 4:30, we were just waiting on the car to get there.  I will say that I am glad they had a lounge area with football on.  It was getting to be a long day.....

Sometime between 4:30 and 5:30, the lady that did our sale came out of her office and said she couldn't find the county we lived in in her database.  I walked into her office and looked over her shoulder and her computer screen and noticed that her program said she was still in GA, not TN.  I told her that but she had no clue how to get to TN and really didn't have much of a clue as to what she was doing anyway!  She told Chad that she added another $100 to the price of the car because TN charges them that rate to do the paperwork.  Chad told her no deal then.  He agreed on one price and that was it.  She calls her manager and they take off the fee.  Turns out, I have to do all of the work on the TN side.  They don't file for our tags or anything! Basically that was a fee that pocketed, had we paid it.

Finally, at 5:30, the car arrives.  I was so tired of hanging out there.  There was only so much I could do- watch football, Facebook, tweet, instagram, and pinterest were all done more than I ever have at one sitting!   We were restless and tired.  Luckily, we were able to drive the car and was happy with it so we signed off on everything.  While we did paperwork, the car left the lot AGAIN, to be detailed.  My comment to our sales guy was that it was a brand new car, what it in the world needed to be cleaned on it?!  We asked them to try to do it quickly because we wanted to get out of there and back on the road.  We FINALLY left the dealer a little after 7:00.  We were tired and hungry but found a Steak N Shake so we ate there and headed back home.  We pulled onto our street just as the ball dropped (we listened on the radio).  So far, I am happy with the vehicle.  I just hope it is safe and will not give us umpteen thousand problems that the GC did!

New Year's Day was spent cheering on our Vols to an Outback Bowl Win!!!!  Gotta give a huge shoutout to our local boy, Malik Foreman on his INT!  It's Great to be a Tennessee Vol!