The Zorio Family: Mentone, Alabama Trip 2019

The kids spend 4 night with Nana and Grandad after we returned from Washington, D.C. The had a great time spending some special time with them, and I got a ton done/organized at our house while they were gone and John was working! On the Friday when they were to return to us we had another exciting trip planned. I met Nana and Grandad in Chattanooga to pick up the kids. Then the kids and I drove from Chattanooga to Mentone, Alabama! Thank goodness for GPS because without it I would never have made it from Chattanooga to Mentone. We were on some little middle of nowhere type roads with nothing around and with lots of turns. This was definitely the fastest route and beautiful, but I would never have made it without the GPS. John met us in Mentone after he got off work, and our friends, the Houghs met us at the cabin also!

This was when I got the kids back from Nana and Grandad. They had such fun spending 4 nights with them, but I missed them SO bad! I've never been away from them that long!

This was the road basically all the way from Chattanooga.

Luckily there wasn't ANY traffic so we could just stop for a second (like this!) to look at the GPS on my phone for a second to make sure we were actually going the correct direction!

Almost there!

Made it to the cabin!

The kids liked how it looked like Lincoln Logs! Haha

View from the cabin's screen porch looking down toward the river.

After arriving and eating dinner all the kids could think about was making s'mores in the firepit by the river-so that's exactly what we did!

Nora Kate was thrilled to get to spend the weekend playing with her friend, Annie!

The girls played rock paper scissors while waiting on the fire to be ready for them to roast marshmallows.

Clayton LOVES s'mores!

Nora Kate, Annie, and Ruby.

The cabin had two canoes, and the kids could not wait to explore in the canoes!

The dads were the first to venture out in the canoes with the kids.

I wasn't sure how deep the river would be, so I packed life jackets for the canoes..haha! Another joke, because as you can see here, it was shallow enough for all the kids to stand it. Thankfully it was still deep enough to canoe, so really for our crew of 4 adults, 7 kids ages 3 to 10 it was a perfect depth.

Dawson probably loved the canoeing more than anyone! He's such an outdoor kid!

Checking out the river from the porch.

Between us and the Houghs we had all kind of fun things for the kids to do!

They had fun with bubbles!

and they had fun with sidewalk chalk!

We brought a ton of art supplies, and there were lots of tables in the cabin for the kids to craft on!

Saturday morning we "hiked" to the falls...HAHA! I packed water...it ended up being a 322 foot hike! Joke was on me! But it was beautiful...not very safe...see our grip on Clayton and even Nora Kate, but so pretty! Glad we made the 322 foot hike to see it!

The highlight of this part for the kid was seeing a watersnake! AH! Then Clayton threw a rock at it, and it swam closer to us. AHH!

Another part of the falls.

Saturday night the kids wanted more s'mores, we decided to let them make s'mores in the fireplace on the screened in porch this time.

The enjoyed this too!

View of our cabin from down at the river.

The kids were so excited for a weekend with friends!

Dawson and Carter played with Henry.

Nora Kate had Annie.

And Clayton had Ruby.

So fun!

Clayton was also excited that we let him sleep in the bottom bunk of these cool bunk beds!

More art time!

Look a frog on the rock!

There were tons of frogs everywhere!

We went to the bustling "downtown" (hah!) of Mentone on Saturday morning and checked out the cute little Mentone Market.

Then more canoeing.

There was a sign in the cabin that warned not to feed the bears of alligators...well, this had Nora Kate very worried! This was me walking her back up the river to our cabin because she HAD to get out of the canoe to go back to shore because she thought she saw an alligator in the water. (doesn't make much sense does it?!)