Tag Archives: Travel

Trip to Nashville?

Forest Giants in Bernheim Forest
Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00170

Today was our trip to Nashville. Now, we knew where we were actually going to end up and the kids did not. You see, my sister and her husband invited us to stay with them for a week in Kentucky and Nashville was the closest airport that had a direct flight for us. We told the kids a couple of weeks ago that I had gotten a blogger trip to Nashville. However, when we landed we were met by my sister right outside the gates. At first they were wondering what she was doing there since I said that we would not be seeing her this trip. It took Eva a couple of moments to realize what was happening and she was so excited. Andrew, though, wasn’t as excited. He was upset. He began to cry because he had told his friends that he was going to Nashville and now, I think, he may have felt like he was lying to them. He got over things quickly enough when we told him that we would spend at least one day in Nashville.

We piled into the van that we would affectionately refer to as “The Corn-mobile” for our entire trip. This was a minivan that ran on E85. That is not easy to come by and so we were always on the lookout for more E85.

Along our trip to Tara’s house which was 2 hours away, we stopped at the Bernheim Forest to go searching for Forest Giants. These were giant wooden giants created by artist Thomas Dambo. I had recently heard about him and his project of giant wooden trolls. I guess the installation of these giants was something quite new and was a big draw for people visiting the Bernheim Forest. There are four giants and the round trip to see them all is 2 miles. The kids were troopers to walk through the heat to see them all, but they were worth it. You can see more on our video below.

For dinner we went to a BBQ joint called Feast. We had an excellent meal and went to bed with very full bellies and food left over to bring home. This would become breakfast for the next few days for me and Eva. We’re the only ones up for breakfast BBQ.

A Netflix Survival Guide for the Long Holiday Road Trip

Pack Your Phone - Big Kid

Three years ago we took a family trip up to New Hampshire to the Christmas Farm Inn for Thanksgiving. This is a three hour ride. It is a long ride for a couple of little kids but it isn’t too terrible. We had some DVDs to take with us and a car that had a DVD player for the kids. Now, thrown in a blizzard and an extra four hours to the ride plus the kids’ desire to watch the same DVD repeatedly for those extra four hours. You can only imagine how keyed up I was. Luckily that turned out to be one of the best trips ever as a family.

If we were to make the trip again one thing that I would make sure we do is check out all the shows that we could download on our Netflix app. That way we could load up the kids’ devices with some great content that they could watch on the ride. I think we’d be safe putting at least six hours of downloads on each device. That would be enough for many episodes of their favorite shows like Beat bugs, Super Monsters, Trollhunters and Project MC2. It is really easy to do, too. Just fire up the app and choose “Available for Download” then search and download your favorite shows. Definitely make sure that you choose “available for Download” first. This will save you from getting your hopes up that a show is downloadable only to find out that it is not. There are a ton of shows that are available for download but there are also some that are not. Follow my advice to prevent any unwanted frustration. Netflix shows you how road trips can be better in this video which has a re-purposed popular show intro.

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