Well we made it! The National Cornbread Festival in South Pittsburg, TN. What a journey this has been. I loved the photos with the giant cow. This whole experience has been larger than life. 
The wotan goes all out for this huge celebration! 
South Pittsburg is the home of Lodge Cast Iron so Lodge has great community involvement with the event. They also open their factory doors for the festival for tours. This is the only time to do these tours. 
We enjoyed some samples from Cornbread Alley. Local non-profits make recipes and people donate money to vote for the best. The charities keep the money from the voting!
I wasn’t exactly sure of some of these cornbread flavors! Some had jalapeños, cajun spices, coconut and other weird things. I guess I can’t speak since my recipe had blue cheese in it! 
We got the cutest little skillets from a prize table from Cracker Barrel. 
We signed the banner at the kids station. They had all sorts of fun games and crafts. 
We did sand art. Unfortunately, gravity got the best of them when we were on the tour later in the day and they didn’t make it home. Oh well, we had a lot of fun making them anyway. 
The Lodge Foundry was impressive. It was HUGE! The machines were gigantic! We walked all around the factory a few times to understand how the entire process worked. They had little learning station set up to explain each step in the process. 
I thought it was neat that they recycle all of the scrap to use again in a new production run, there was very little waste! 
I loved all the different patterns for the bottoms of the skillets. I hope to get a few before we leave. 
After the tour we headed to Russel Cave National Park to learn about native hunting with the atlatl and bow and arrow. We also turned the cave from the boardwalk and saw all the dig sites that were active. 
We completed our Junior Ranger books and had a very unique swearing in ceremony! We were all laughing so hard! 