On Thursday, we went to Anakeesta in Gatlinburg with the whole Wilken crew. You start at the bottom of the mountain and can take a ski lift up or the Ridge Rambler truck up the mountain. The line for the ski lift was over an hour long, so we opted for the Ridge Rambler, which was a 5 minute wait. The ride up the mountain was a "fun" one. I'm glad I didn't have to drive it!
At the top, there are a lot of different activities you can do. We started off with climbing the lookout tower in the gardens area. You can sort of see the tower in the back left of this picture.
Avery stopped off to rest at the firepit. The view from up on the mountain were gorgeous!
We made it to the top of the tower! On a side note, Avery HATES heights! The floor of this tower sloped downward towards the edge and it was swaying, which was a little freaky. Well, in this picture, I was holding Avery for the picture and I noticed her heart was just racing. I asked her if she was ok and she said "NO". She was freaking out inside about being up on the tower! She sat on a bench with Patty for a few minutes, who also does not like heights and then we headed back down to the ground.
But not before my other *fearless* daughter decided to do push-ups on the plastic floor at the top of the tower!
And then Grayson joined her and they laid on the see-through ground!
Back on solid ground! There were a lot of fun picture opportunities at Anakeesta.
Avery and her tumbling...
Here the kiddos are on Willow, Anakeesta’s 20′ tall “keeper of the Forest”.
The kids did the Treeventure Challenge Course. Rope bridges between treehouses, with a slide.
There was a short little walk called Bearventure that the kids and Papa did.
We grabbed lunch outside and enjoyed the views and nice weather. They even had a band playing 90's country music. It was gorgeous! They had rows of rocking chairs to relax in.
After lunch, we did the Treetop Skywalk, which is a bunch of rope bridges with little lookouts along the way. These were surprisingly not as stable as I had thought they would be. There was a lot of swinging while walking on them!
After that, we decided to head back to the cabin. The girls were exhausted! Matt, the girls and my Dad wanted to take the ski lift down since we didn't get to do it on the way up. My mom and I opted for the Ridge Rambler back down. I had done enough ski lifts for the week and didn't think I could handle a 20 minute ski lift ride! :) This one was actually really nice with padded seats and had a bar in the front with a map of Anakeesta.
It was a long way down!
My mom and I made it down to the bottom first. They took a picture of us taking a picture of them! We are sitting down on the bench in the shade.
Erin and Grayson stuck around to do the dueling zipline adventure.
My parents came over to our cabin afterwards to hang out for a bit before dinner. The girls got some more swimming and hot tub time in.
We had dinner at the house and started packing up for our long trip home. There were some final air hockey games between Matt and the girls. Then, the girls and I finished off the series we were streaming on Netflix - Dance 100. It was only 6 episodes, so we were able to watch it all during the week. We wanted to find out who won! :)
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