Grandfather Mountain Highland Games 2008: Debriefing Part 1

Well we had an awesome time at this years GMHG's and unanimously decided that it needs to become an annual family tradition. Of course next year at this point we should will be enjoying the real thing in Scotland itself, however when we are in the states its already penciled in on the schedule.

We took tons of pictures and have even more stories, so we've split it all up into two posts. In this one we will cover the Traveling, Camping, and Food, and the Games, Music, and Final Thoughts in part 2. And as always theres more photos than we could fit here over at Flickr.


Traveling

The travel time was listed on Google as almost 9 hours which would have turned out to be pretty accurate...had we not spend almost an hour turning circles in the pouring rain about 20 minutes from our destination : )

The Mercedes performed superbly (as I hoped), the turbocharged Diesel thrusted us up any incline that the BlueRidge Parkway could throw at it, and we found ourselves cruising by numerous other vehicles struggling to make it to the top...all this while resting firmly at 3K RPM!

James had the privilege of getting the best view in the house (which also cost him his lunch through the mountains : ). He also got to share in the pain that is filling up a whole tank with $70 worth of Diesel.



Claire did reeeeealy well for being 3 weeks old, heck she slept most of the ride, but even she has her limits after 6+ hours!



It worked out really well that Leah was nice enough to let James and Eden sleep with her in the big bed when we stayed in the hotel on the way down.



The Diesel in the south was definitely cheaper, we got it for $4.64 at this one little place.



And of course we passed by Max Meadows...why does that sound so familiar?



Camping

Its impossible to describe the atmosphere present in the camping areas at the games, so I wont even try. Suffice it to say, family friendly does not even come close to describing how great an environment it was.

We got there late (in the scheme of things) by arriving on Thursday as many people camp out the entire week before the games, so we were wondering what kind of spot we would get. Turns out God had hand-picked our spot for us beforehand :) We had room for both of our tents (stuff tent and living tent) and had a great tree for shade and hanging the flag. Plus we were near the parking lot where our car was for an easy exit if need be.



We set up our smaller 4Man tent as the StuffTent where we kept all our unused junk, food storage, and wet clothes instead of keeping them in the tent we were sleeping in. Heres Laurens great job of organizing :)



I mentioned that the spot we wound up with was perfect because of placement and whatnot, however a large part of the reason it was so great was because of the family next door. As soon as we started unloading the stuff, they came over and asked if they could help set up the tent (which was great in the rain!). We then found out that they had 6 year old girl, and a 4 year old boy would be great playmates for Eden and James all weekend. We hung out together as families (not as much as we would have liked in retrospect), and our time with them remains one of the highlights of the trip!



Here are the kids just before saying goodbye.




The Food

I'm not really sure why I have a separate section on the food, as most of what we ate was typical camping food; burgers, hot dogs, and sundry canned food. Maybe I'm just hungry and like looking at the pictures again :)

We did however have one day of eating some Scottish/English food. Eden and James got the Fish and Chips (old standby), Lauren had a Bridie (basically meat in pastry), and of course I had to have some Haggis. The cool thing was that the vendor was called "Cameron Foods", and was run by members of the Cameron Clan...our clan! (sadly no discount)



We also enjoyed some other not-so-scottish food while listening to the Celtic Jam, namely Sweet Potato Fries (with brown sugar) and a Bloomin Onion (mmmm).