A Birthday Party and More!

The most eventful part of this last week was Chase's 26th birthday! It started out with a birthday breakfast and presents and ended with BBQ hamburgers and games with our friends, Christy and Eric. I just want to say that I am sooooo glad Chase was born! This last weekend, on Saturday specifically, we attended part of the Secret City Festival here in Oak Ridge which was a tour of a government lab called Y12. The history of Oak Ridge is quite fascinating as the town was used as a base for the Manhattan Project and was a complete secret to the civilian world. All residents during this time were related to this project and there were guard towers and fences that kept everyone out and monitored all that came in, therefore it was known as the secret city. This town was the source of all the enriched uranium that was used in the nuclear bomb Little Boy that was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 and aided in the ending of world war 2. For some more educational reading go to the most correct source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Ridge,_Tennessee! (Hopefully you all know I am being a little sarcastic, but it really is a good source of quick information although not the most scholarly resource).

On Saturday we also found this awesome scenic bike trail.

The weekend ended with a nice leisurely drive up into the Smoky Mountains. It was so nice to be surrounded by mountains again!

Happy Birthday Chase!

Here is Chase with one of his new birthday games! A funny insert...we went outside in the evening of Chase's birthday to play some games on the deck but soon decided to go back inside because the bugs were so bad. Once we got back inside we realized we had let some bugs into the house with us so Chase became the bug terminator!

If you can't tell what he is doing, he is holding a vacuum and sucking up any bugs that came around while playing a game!! He is quite the multi-tasker!

Here we are taking a little rest from the bike ride Saturday.

The following pictures were taken of the Smoky Mountains while we were driving through one of the parts of this awesome National Park called Cades Cove.

I took this shot below. I thought it was a pretty cool picture!

Here we are in front of a little creek in the mountains! So far we are really enjoying Tennessee and the green and trees everywhere as well as the mountains! Its beautiful country for sure!