In Which We Go On Vacation, I Check Something Off My Bucket List, and We Get Very Sore

Hey hey hey! Fancy seeing me here! Welcome to the maybe-monthly post here on A Barefoot Gal. 🙂

We went on vacation to Norris Lake in Tennessee a few weeks back and had a lot of fun. AND I brought my camera and took lots of pictures so I can show you guys what we were up to. 

The highlight of the first day was, I think, checking off a very important part of my bucket list: eating at Long John Silver’s! It never seemed like a very appealing fast food restaurant and it most certainly did not exceed my expectations, but I know now what it’s like which is fun. And we rang the bell thingy to say that the food was good so I guess we kinda lied there, but it was part of the experience right? 

I got fish tacos and they had coleslaw in them which I don’t like so I just took them out of the limp tortilla and ate them plain. It wasn’t awful, but there was overall just a lot of fried stuff and it got wearisome.

So now you know what to expect from Long John Silvers!

But we should probably move on. After about seven hours of very cramped travel (I’m hoping that’s the last vacation we take in our suburban-ish car which really doesn’t fit five basically 6 foot tall people along with Carmen and I) we made it to the lake house! It was pretty similar to your typical lakehouse with profound signs saying things like “Lake Life” “Go jump in the lake” and “LAKE”, but it was nice! And we were right on a section of Norris Lake so we got a lot of swimming in. 

The first evening we ordered pizza and headed down to the dock for a picnic and swimming. And no, we didn’t wait thirty minutes after swimming but we also didn’t do any drowning so that’s good! There were also some kayaks so we used those as well. The lake is kind of like a river and it’s a lot longer than it is wide. We were on a narrower stretch of it so it didn’t work well for boating (more on that later) but it was great for swimming!

We didn’t play a lot of games, but a few of us did attempt Clue. It didn’t quite work out, but that’s usually how Clue goes when I play it. It was still fun! 

We did some more swimming the next day. We forgot to bring pool noodles or any other floaty device, and the water was so deep you couldn’t touch the bottom. For some reason the stores didn’t have any pool floaties so Mom and Dad thought of getting $5 air mattresses! It worked very well and I think they’re probably more durable than other pool mattresses.

One of the best parts of the vacation was when we rented a boat and got to go tubing! There was a nearby marina that was on Norris Lake, so we went there and rented a boat for several hours and had a lot of fun with it.

Dad did most of the driving and by the end he had gotten down some good tactics for making it hard to stay on the tube (which is a good thing – it makes it more fun).

Please observe Jeff’s yellow shirt. Please admire Jeff’s yellow shirt. I bought him that shirt when we were looking for pool noodles at Dollar General and he actually wears it!!

We brought the boat back to the dock so we could eat lunch and bring our towels and mattresses and such onto the boat. After lunch we loaded up and headed down to the dock. Well, not all of us got the memo on the loading up part. *cough cough* Jeff  *cough cough*

Tubing was so much fun! I had done it about four years ago and it was really fun then, so I was excited to do it again. Jeff and I tried it out first time and it was really hard to get a good grip so I didn’t last too long. Carmen and Allison went next and they did pretty well!

Usually one of the two passengers was holding on for dear life while the other was just fine. 

Jeff with his GoPro again! There were a lot of pictures/videos between him and Allison and I.

Annnnd then there was one.

Next it was Logan and Jeff’s turn to head out to… lake.

Their expressions were hilarious. XD

JEFF’S LEGS. It looks like some poor human has just fallen off the tube and you can only see their legs, but they are actually still attached to Jeff.

Jeff had a rough time staying all the way on, but Logan managed pretty well.

The contrast between their expressions is marvelous.

And …..

There they go!

We also stopped tubing every now and then and just floated around on the mattresses which was very sunny but nice. It was fun when speed boats drove by and made waves for us.

The next few days I was terribly sore and my neck kinda wanted to take a day off, but it was definitely worth it! Hopefully we’ll get to go tubing again soon.

We did some other things too like bonfires (we saw a tiny toad which was fun) and “relaxing” in the hot tub (all five of us siblings managed to squeeze in so it wasn’t terribly relaxing) and watching movies (from RedBox because we didn’t have any wifi which we actually didn’t know about but it was quite nice in the end!). But that’s the extent of my pictures basically so that’s all you get to hear about.

I hope you enjoyed this post! I really want to know how many people have been to Long John Silver’s and what your thoughts on it are, whether or not you’ve gone so comments about that would be appreciated! Oh and also have you been water tubing and do you like lakes and such, those are good things to tell me about! 😀

until next post (but don’t hold your breath!)