January Newsletter - Travel

Visiting with Tanya

As we said in our newsletter, after the wedding, we visited one of my (Mindy’s) oldest and closest friends, Tanya (friends since the age of ten), in her beautiful mountain home in Tennessee.

Continued below…

Tanya took us to all kinds of fun sites – one of them was a cool place called Bristol Caverns. Walkways wind through the banks of the ancient underground river that carved these remarkable caverns 200 to 400 million years ago. There are vast rooms and arches, columns, and natural stone formations of varying size and kinds. These formations display rich veins of minerals that give the formations beautiful colors of red, blue, gray, brown, and sparkling white. Stalactites and stalagmites, some larger than tree trunks and others smaller than straws, fascinate and give play to the imagination. Where some of these formations have grown together, massive columns have been formed reaching from the floor to the ceiling of the lofty rooms.

After our visit to the caverns and the Country Music Museum we headed to a Ma and Pa fish restaurant in Bristol, for some delicious and simple homemade food. The owner was absolutely thrilled to have guests from Israel and couldn’t wait to share the news with her church group 😊.

We also saw this unexpected sight when driving around this Appalachian mountain countryside 😮:

Tanya loves to go on nature hikes, and she took us on three easy trails that led to beautiful waterfalls. What a pleasure! And we stopped at a very old store - Mast General Store, that has been there since 1883!

And we stopped in on a few farmer’s markets – lots of fruit and vegetables on display, plus some fun corners for visitors’ entertainment.

Tanya’s two dogs – Joey and Zoey – were more than excited when we came back to the house and Mindy had a blast cuddling and playing with them. We thought that our grand-dog Daisy has a lot of energy, but Zoey even surpassed Daisy. And that’s saying a lot!