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Crazy story time!!! My family decided to get together for a big family reunion/vacation over Thanksgiving this year. We have eight kids in our family (I, being one of the youngest) so this was kind of a big deal for us! We hadn't gotten all of our families together all at the same time in a long while, so this was a very anticipated vacation... Unfortunately, our vacation cabin just happened to be right outside Gatlinburg, Tennessee.... *sigh* So, all thirty of us (eight of those being my nieces and nephews who are all under the age of five.) were trapped at the top of a mountain... at night... surrounded by wildfires....with 80 MPH winds blowing the flames right towards us.. and no electricity... With what little cell service we had, we called the owner of the cabin that we were staying in and asked if it was safe to go down the mountain and she told us that a bunch of trees had fallen in the road, making it impassable. On top of that, the walls of the cabin were bending inwards at least four inches because of the wind, knocking off the decorations and making a horrible shrieking sound all at the same time... My brothers kept calling the fire department and they said that they had all of their men putting out fires and that we were, essentially, on our own. After two or three hours of desperate packing in the dark and staring at the flames inching towards us on the horizon, my dad finally just said, "We're leaving." Two of my brothers volunteered to try and make their way down the mountain and see how many trees had fallen. As they were driving out of the driveway, a huge tree fell right in front of the car!! As I was running out to help I looked at the mountain top right behind the house and saw flames no more than a mile away... So me, my five brothers, and my dad were breaking branches and pulling the tree out of the way, trying to make enough room for our cars to get by. Twenty minutes later, with a little help from a tow rope and a whole lot of muscle, we were finally able to start driving down the mountain. We made it safely down the mountain, (with a few scrapes and abrasions to both the cars and us), and promptly hit a downed power line.... *cue crazy laughter* Thankfully it didn't do much damage and we were able to get past that as well. My dad made reservations at a hotel in a town nearby and, after what seemed like forever, we finally arrived there. It was jam packed with people on account of all the evacuations. We stayed there that night and then we all started back to our different home states the next morning. (Turns out, later that day the hotel we stayed at was also evacuated because of the wildfires) When we got home my brothers and I looked like we had just come from battle. We had scrapes, blood, and ash all over us...My brothers are all over 6'6" and most of them have beards so they looked like Spartans... Not to mention the smoke inhalation had made our voices much deeper. Soooo... yeah! While I left out a lot of other insane details that happened, that was my crazy vacation this year!!! Anyone else got any crazy vacation stories?