A few days in Central Kentucky and Middle Tennessee

If you're still reading this, you'll know we are soon coming to the end of our trip.  We packed the last 12 days mostly with family visits, but we did get some fun and interesting (to us, anyway) things in, too, that we'd like to share.

DH's brother lives in central Kentucky, his sister lives in middle Tennessee, and my brother lives on the eastern side of the Atlanta area.  It's been a while since we've been that direction - we usually see DH's siblings when they travel to Florida, and we see my brother sometimes when we overlap while visiting where my parents live.  In fact, we hadn't been to Kentucky or Tennessee since 2017 when DH's father passed away, and we hadn't been to the Atlanta area since 2017 when we went to see Paul McCartney in concert in Duluth.

So we wanted to be sure to spend some time with each of them as long as we were relatively (no pun intended) near them.  So our first stop was to see DH's brother and sister-in-law.  They live near the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site and near Lincoln's boyhood home at Knob Creek.  While we were in the area, we visited both of these sites so I could get my National Park Service Passport stamped and so we could finish the major sites of Lincoln's early life.  There was also a pretty decent Lincoln museum in Hodgenville that we stopped in.  I'll give each of these their own blog post.

Here are a few non-Lincoln highlights from our time with DH's brother and sister-in-law.

My brother-in-law made country ham and eggs for breakfast!

We saw some deer when driving home from Bible Study.

I was less than excited about this big snake crawling around the backyard and onto the patio furniture.  The owl statue was supposed to keep things like that away - guess it's just an old wives' tale.

We stayed with DH's brother for three nights and then headed to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where DH grew up.  He still has some friends from childhood who live there, so we had contacted them earlier in the trip and made plans to see them.  We also have a great-nephew who lives there who is getting married later this summer, but due to some upcoming surgery for me, we won't be able to make it to the wedding - so we wanted a chance to see him and meet his fiancee'.  Our other niece/nephew and family were out of town while we were there, so we missed them.

Bowling Green has changed a lot in the 7 years since DH was last there.  It's grown some, but storms - some from the past and some more recent - changed the landscape quite a bit.  Especially in the neighborhood of his youth and where his parents had lived.  We had seen a few pictures, but until you see it in person, you don't realize how drastic it was.  And his dad's house has been given a total facelift so it's nearly unrecognizable.  I would have loved to see what they did inside, but of course that would be weird to knock on the door to ask.

We also went by the cemetery to visit with DH's parents, grandparents, and uncles and aunts who are buried there.  I wasn't able to go to the memorial service for his father, so I was glad to have the opportunity to pay my respects.  I'm working as the current unofficial family historian for both my family and DH's side of our family, so I felt like I knew more about who everyone was and how they are related.  We got some updated pictures, too.

We splurged and stayed at the new Embassy Suites in Bowling Green; it's a beautiful hotel.

From Bowling Green, we went to Smyrna, Tennessee, to spend the weekend with DH's sister and brother-in-law.  Our niece who lives in the area was also able to come over for the afternoon / evening, so we had a good visit.  DH had a friend who lives nearby so he went to hang out with him a while.  We realized that was the first time since we left home that we weren't in the same place!  We went to church on Sunday and did some shopping at Publix for the following few days.

As for what we did and where we went after Smyrna, you'll have to check back later!

~ Cindy D.