We're Here!

WE MADE IT! We arrived in the state of Tennessee around 8:00 last night after a full day in the car. Surprisingly, no one went crazy after the 16 hour day, although Steph came pretty close; if we didn't get to Tennessee when we did I think she might've had a slight breakdown. 7 hours in the car to just drive through Virginia was making her go a little nuts. Mike was an absolute champ and drove the ENTIRE TRIP. Our AIS time Saturday morning (Ass In Seat) was 5am, and we were in our seats at 5:08. Mike was going to drive until we passed New York and New Jersey because neither Steph nor Faith felt comfortable driving where would be a lot of cars. But once we passed through (miraculously without hitting ANY traffic) Mike said he didn't mind continuing to drive. Although we periodically asked him if he wanted a break, he insisted on driving and eventually made it clear that he was going to be the only one driving. Once we were in the vicinity of Maryville, we called our Habitat for Humanity Contact, Susan. We had wandered around for probably 45 minutes attempting to find the church but had only succeeded in driving around in circles and getting frustrated when Susan came to our rescue.  Susan has been in contact with our group over the last few months via email and has been answering our many questions. We followed her to the Habitat for Humanity's office, and spent the night on the floor of one of their conference rooms because the church we would be staying out wasn't available to us Saturday night. We woke up, packed up the car, and headed to Knoxville this morning. Knoxville is a small city (probably around the same size as Worcester) that is home to the University of Tennessee.  We wandered around the downtown area until we found the Visitors Center. We picked up a map and headed off to the river, where we had a nice lunch outside :) It was almost 80 here today, so although I'm loving the warm weather it's going to be rough at the construction site.  We're FINALLY settled into the church we'll be staying at - two other groups are also going to be staying here; one group of 10 high school students with two chaperones, and a group of 19 other colelge students from Kansas. Not really sure how they're going to divvy up the work to the different groups, but I'm excited to find out! Tomorrow we're hopefully going to be going hiking after our workday, so we'll see how tomorrow goes!