Maggie Valley Ice Festival - One Tank Getaway

In the dreery January months after I've set my goals for the year, managed my budget and made a crude plan for the upcoming holidays and traveling we'll be doing this year, I start to get stir crazy. When we lived in Southern California and the kids were too little for school, January was a welcomed warm and sunny month filled with beach trips and day trips around the area, visiting parks and finding frozen yogurt shops while we were out. January in the Midwest was all about the snow activities and hitting the sledding hills early on the weekend before everyone else came, or going to the skating rink for some indoor excersize. Now that we live in the South, January alwyas seems to be teetering on 'too cold' or rainy, which tends to make me stir crazy. Since becoming a nurse I've tried to take boring January and use it for extra shifts so that when it does warm up we can do fun things and I won't need to work extra to pay for them. > During my extra shift on Friday I was trying to find something for us to do Saturday afternoon after my shift ended at 1pm and I stumbled upon the Maggie Valley Ice Festival and even though its a bit of a drive, I wanted to go. That night when I got home from work I told my family about it, and even though I didn't have any answers for them about anything other than ice sculptures, it seemed I had peaked the interest of my teen and tween (something that seems harder and harder to do recently)> On Saturday I came home from work, made deli sandwich kababos, made some home made hot cocoa, packed my new backpack I got for Christmas for exactly these trips, and we each grabbed a bottle of water and we left. The drive was just over 2 hours so we started the last Harry Potter book where we left off and drove to the mountains.> About 2 miles away from the festival traffic slowed to a crawl and hubby said I should find parking anywhere we could and then we could walk there. I have many of these events under my belt and didn't want to park somewhere we may get towed so I stayed in traffic until we saw the entrance, which was a bit less grand than I was expecting, and we parked in the area next to it. > We put on our jackets, gloves, etc and walked through the entrance of the festival grounds and... I was underwhelmed. There were some pretty cool ice sculptures and interactive ice sculptures (a slide, tic tac toe board and cornhole set up) and on the stage was a man carving an ice sculpture, but not quite as much to see as I was hoping for. There were booths of local vendors and food trucks, but that was it. > I'd be interested in going to the ice festival again next year, but I would make sure to include it in a ski or sledding weekend so that we don't drive that far for 20 minutes of walking around. > I am happy that we are getting closer to the end of the last Harry Potter book, we tend to only listen when we're in the car driving for long periods of time, so I don't consider this trip a wash. Plus the way things have been going lately we most likely would have been just sitting around the house the whole time anyway and at least we got to see something new and fun and spend time together listening to the book. >

Home made cocoa for us to sip on in the cold mountain evening!

Tic Tac Toe (it would have been nice if there were many more interactive ice games like this since the few we saw were being played by kids that didn't seem to want to give them up, not that I blame them!>