Fam… I truly have to say that we had a blast this past weekend at the Homestead Festival in Tennessee. This was the second time with this event and both times we absolutely enjoyed our time being there! We always walk away from this event with full cups. Now we don’t go to hear people speak but we do enjoy our time talking with so many like minded people.
We spent our time helping our friend Jill with Whispering Willow Farms ( family, they are on YouTube if you want to enjoy some videos) at her booth space where she was selling lots of household items. To start, it was absolutely amazing to see how many small business’s that she brought together for one set up! She had wood tools for sourdough, sourdough starter, fermenting tools, coffee, hand towels and her book! Thursday was spent setting up her space so we could be ready bright and early on Friday. Once set up was done we headed out to meet an online friend for the first time. After many failed attempts at finding somewhere to eat, we finally found an amazing pizza place! We spent such a long time relaxing and then heading out to a cigar lounge to relax outside. I believe we were hanging out for a solid 3 hours or more. So many belly laughs were had, good food, good cigars and just wonderful conversation. We finally headed back to the camper and immediately fell asleep for the night.
Friday was the first day of the festival. Oh how we were so excited for this! Jeremy and I were so excited to see a few faces that we met from the festival from last year. We managed to spend a lot of time helping with sales in the booth but being able to chat with so many people probably took the cake on what we did! Towards the end of the day we started to notice a storm was brewing. While having a storm at an event where your product is on the line is a bit scary, I will say how everything happened was pretty fun. We were in the middle of talking to someone when I started to notice the lightening across the Sky. When the conversation ended, it just started to rain and we immediately moved to get everything further under the table and out of the rain. Then we dropped the tent to help guard against the rain. The tent was tied down but that didn’t seem to do much with the wind. Gusts were going and we ended up having to help the tent down ourselves. Jill and Nathans neighbor helped us with the tent and stayed with us during the worst of the storm. He filled our heads with knowledge of things he just learned himself and I will say this was the best way possible to spend a storm. But then the jokes started flowing and we all started to bust up. Finally the storm pretty much passed and we felt like it was good enough for us to head out. So we went back to the camper, showered and then headed back up to Jill and Nathans Airbnb for dinner with many new people. We met so many new couples and truly had to chuckle when we heard one couple is only an hour from us and another is about two hours from us. There’s a chance we will need to make some small trips to visit new friends! But it got to about 9 pm when it started to hit how much we felt the day. Once we got to the camper, both kids were fast asleep and we followed soon after.
Saturday, let’s be real, was very difficult to wake up. Haha. I truly struggled to keep my eyes open when we headed out for the event. Once we got there it was time to reset up the space from the storm and it truly was a speedy process as we had a good idea on how we wanted everything placed. We were also down to the last bit of inventory and everything was put out onto the table. This day Jill had a speaking segment and to hear that she had the entire tent packed with people, probably was my absolute favorite part. Here is a friend busting her butt and sharing with others her different ways of gardening. You just have to be downright excited for a friend during a time like this. To see her hard work paying off in just a simple form of people showing up to hear her talk, it truly was a wonderful sight to see. After packing up her booth space, we headed back to the camper to get ourselves packed up and ready for our trip out the next day. I was a tad bit excited for the moment to relax from the three jam packed days. Once we had everything set up and ready, we headed to bed!
Sunday, Oh Sunday. We left a tad bit later than we had hoped but I would say Jeremy and I had a pretty decent pack up system go on that we were able to have everything ready at a decent amount of time. I believe we were about 3 or 4 hours into our drive when we made a pit stop for gas and then headed back onto the road. A little bit into the drive we ended up getting stuck in traffic. After realizing we weren’t moving for a solid chunk of time, we decided to see what was actually going on. There was a car wreck and they ended up having to call in 3 different helicopters, at least 7 ambulance, a fire truck, at least 10 police and a few other random helpers to the accident. It was 2 hours of waiting and lots of praying for the families involved before we started back on the road. We ended up getting home around 8 PM that evening. After unpacking we managed to once again head to bed as we were still tired from the weekend.
Monday, not much happened. We took a slower day and got ourselves back to work. It was the kind of day we absolutely needed to have after the weekend we had. Over all I would say that we truly had a great time, met so many new people, made friends, connected with current friends and down right felt inspired by others. 10 out of 10 I would recommend this event!