Merry Christmas from North Carolina

Christmas break this year is spent away from the Michigan cold. I am certainly not missing the temperatures:

It is actually quite cold down here as well as a cold front has decided to cross the eastern side of the US as a late christmas present for everybody.... but I’ll take southern state cold over northeast cold at any time.

The drive down was wet but uneventful (in a good way). Bailey got to ride an elevator for the first time in his dog life. Not a big success🙈

And we got to visit a Walmart deep in the mountains where everybody wears mossy oak outfits and looks (and talks) like they just stepped out of Duck Dynasty. That did not stop us from a dog potty break though

This time we have rented a pet friendly Airbnb house. Or half a house as we do share it with the owners. They invited us to Christmas Eve service at their church - elevation church. That was - ehm - quite an experience. I don’t think it technically counts as a mega church but for people like us, parking attendants, smoke machines and laser lights, live broadcast of the sermon from somewhere else, and free earplugs for everybody due to the insane decibel level, was very different from what we usually do😳

We spent Christmas Eve with our family down here (and I absolutely forgot to take any pictures whatsoever, but ya’ll know how Christmas Eve dinners usually go right?).

On Christmas morning Luca woke us all up at 7AM on the dot. And after a solid gift frenzy and some quality time spend on the phone with T mobile about activation of some new iPhones, we walked the dog and went to the movies. And luckily found an open CVS where we could get some frozen dinner as we forgot to prepare for that before the stores closed the day before:

Yesterday (which was...... Tuesday...... I think...... #christmasbrain) we spent the day with Birgitte and Doug (and Hannah) at the Billy Graham library. I admit that my expectations were not exactly high.Especially not when we started out meeting the mechanical talking cow:

But it was such a good experience after that. They had several rooms connected, each dedicated to a certain theme of his life. I didn’t know much about him walking in, and I had no idea what he managed to accomplish. He was one of the first western pastors to break though the iron curtain and go preach in communist countries and the room with video footage from him visiting Romania, Moscow etc, which you got to watch sitting in the shadow of the Berlin Wall while being blinded regularly by the search light from the guard tower almost gave me goosebumps.

Again - I totally forgot to take any pictures, but Teresa did ask me to snap a photo of her in front of the giganormous Christmas tree by the entrance:

And as I write we are driving even further south to Charleston in South Carolina to spend the day with friends from Michigan❤️