Howdy there, dear readers!

I am allowed to say howdy now, because I’m currently residing in Dallas, Texas. And I believe that Texas-people are cowboys, and cowboys say howdy. Some of you know that I left The Netherlands almost two weeks ago for a journey to the great land of the free, and now, here I am. After a week of running and driving around like crazy, I’ll now have to weeks of peace and happiness by the pool of my uncle’s house. I will, of course, tell you all about my life here and I will start at the very beginning. Photos will follow later, and with later I think I mean a whole lot later, but I’m not sure about that. Anyways – it all started on that Saturday morning, nearly to weeks ago when Joshua and I, still sleepy, got into the car on our way to Schiphol..

We first left Schiphol for London, which was a rather short, but also quite funny flight, because all of the stewards were male. Me and my very little flying experience thought this rather funny, especially when they came over and asked everybody for drinks in their cool English accents. My brother was sitting next to the window so he could see London, and I just pushed my camera over his face hoping I’d get the London Eye on there. (I did, actually!) We arrived at London, late, so we had to hurry into this bus which took us to another terminal. There was this strange lady who tore our boarding passes apart and gave us new ones for no reason, and after that we walked real fast to our flight to Chicago, which was already boarding. This flight would take eight hours, so armed with my Lord of the Rings-book I settled myself into a seat, wearing a thick vest and covered myself in the blankets that were on the seats. The good news was that there was this cool screen on which you could watch movies (I watched The Last Song, it was pretty), the bad news was that there was a lot of turbulence and that sucked. I think I got some sleep, but I was pretty tired and I was feeling a little weird when we finally arrived in Chicago.

Over there it was superhot and we had to wait forever in line for the stupid custom guys (who told me that when I would go and study art history, I’d probably end up serving fries at the McDonalds) and our suitcases. Then we were kind of lost, and were not, walked through half of the airport and finally arrived at Gate 20, only to find it had been changed to 3 and so we had to walk the entire way back. Yeah, we love airports. After the short flight in the teeny-tiny airplane we arrived, tired and feeling a little lost, in Memphis.

There, tons of family was waiting for us. There was my uncle (who’s Dutch) and my aunt (she’s American) and her two cuuuute kids (like supercute-cute), also my aunt’s sister, her husband an her son and also my aunt’s parents. We drove to the house of the parents, drank coke, spent some time talking and had a lot of fun laughing at my brother’s strange Scottish accent (he’s Dutch, so..?) but I was very happy when I could lay my head down on the soft four pillows that were on my bed.

The peace didn’t last long though, because the next morning at 8.30 we had to leave for an eight hour drive (or something) to Sevierville, Ohio. There, we would attend the awesome Answers in Genesis-apologetics-conference. We were pretty tired when we arrived at the hotel and after we settled down for a bit I was about to experience my first American fastfood restaurant. We went to Ruby Tuesday and I got myself a burger and some fries while I was wondering about the nice waiter who was all like: ‘Hey, how you doing?’, because our waiters don’t do that. When we got back to the hotel I only remember my gigantic bed and the four pillows I so longed for, after that, it’s all black (:

The next morning, after sleeping in for a bit (finally!), I was about to experience some more weirdness: the American breakfast. These crazy people somehow love everything hot and toasty while they’re eating it at 8 o’clock in the morning. I’m not kidding, Americans eat hamburgers for breakfast. I settled for some yoghurt, fruit and orange juice, feeling kind of a loner eating that food. Then we went into the town and I was just laughing out loud. Seriously. There’s like a gazilliontrillion billboards everywhere with big shiny neon things and a hundred of attractions at the side of the road that are trying to be bigger than the thousands of fastfood restaurants that look like a forest so dense. I was seriously scared, at first. It’s SO big and everything is just SO huge. Really, really scary. And funny, haha. So when we passed the wilderness of billboards we got close to the real wilderness: The Great Smokey Mountains.

And that’s where the adventure really began. We went hiking to some place called The Chimney Tops. So when you know me, you are probably like this: ‘Inge, you probably mean walking.. Not hiking!’ That, my dear friend, is a very logical thought. Inge + sports activity = not happening. Yet, it did. I actually hiked to The Chimney Tops, and honestly, it was terrible. The climb was sooo long and sooo heavy and I just felt terrible, so terrible. When we made it to the top, there was more horribleness, because before you could make it the real top, you’d have to climb this. Yup. Well, I got half way before totally freaking out. It was cool though, and the way down was a lot easier. We stopped at this mountain river and we just totally relaxed there for a long time. So gooood! We drove down, got some MacDonalds driveby food and then went to our first night at the conference..

More about that in the next blogpost! Bye for now <3