We lived the hotel life for 5 weeks and made it through! It has taken me quite some time to write this post. In fact, it's February 2022 and this happened in September. It was stressful and hard. The kids thought it was quite the adventure, but it wasn't as glamorous for Michael and I. It's taken us quite a while to recover!
The day the tree fell on our house we had nowhere to sleep and couldn't get in touch with the insurance company on the weekends. The Dunn's were so nice to let us stay at their house for most of the day while we frantically tried to figure out what to do! It's surprisingly hard to find a hotel room for six in Nashville on a weekend. Most of the hotels we called were booked for bachelorette parties. We called multiple hotels.
We found a hotel in green hills and stayed at the Courtyard Marriott for two nights. On Monday morning we frantically got ready for school and then immediately called the insurance company to work everything out. They booked us as at another hotel for a week. We moved to the Home2Suites in Bellevue for the week. The insurance company also immediately had someone come and pack up our entire playroom, living room and kitchen. We were told to grab anything we thought we might need for the year because once our things were in storage, they could not be moved out until it was time to move back into the house. It was definitely stressful!
We weren't in connecting rooms, so it was hard to get out of the hotel in the morning since the kids things were strewn about two completely different rooms. The kids thought it was great and enjoyed waffles in the morning. It was nice to walk downstairs to grab coffee and a granola bar in the morning instead of making it myself.
We got some weird looks walking into and out of the hotel every morning with four kids in uniforms and backpacks.
We had some amazing friends that gave us gift cards to all of the surrounding restaurants. It was fun to walk and get ice cream when we were feeling a little stressed out.
We had so many sporting events going on that we were not in the hotel that much, but we did find time to swim in the indoor pool a few times.
The insurance company would only book our hotel room for about a week at a time since we were also looking for a rental. Once it was time to rebook the hotel it would be completely sold out again and we would have to move. After a week at the Home2Suites we moved back to Green Hills to the Residence Inn. The pool was outside at this hotel and pretty chilly. We still found one day to enjoy it.
For our last week in a hotel we stayed in the Vanderbilt area. This was by far the hardest stay for us. There was a parking garage that took a while to get out of. There was also two different elevators you had to take from the parking garage to the room. The traffic was also horrendous to Saint Henry. By this time we were really tired of staying in a hotel and the extra 30-45 minutes it took to get to school and around the hotel was exhausting. I was also really really tired of doing laundry in a hotel. It was hard keeping $5 of quarters on hand for one load of laundry. Not to mention that the dryers were absolutely awful so it took a really long time for clothes to dry.
We tried to make the best of it though and walked to some fun restaurants. We walked to Elliston Place Soda Shop, Martin's barbeque and Smoothie King. We also had amazing friends inviting us over for dinner multiple times a week!
After desperately searching for a rental, we finally found one starting the week after fall break. We were pretty excited and were ready to be settled and not living out of our cars! I'm pretty sure if we can make it through this as a family we can make it through almost anything. I'm proud of these sweet little children for rolling with the tough cards we were dealt!
