GRAY, Tenn. -- Rosemary Kleske had spent hours online.

Some venues required her group to pay for their cooking services – a tough bill to swallow when her group of church ladies could certainly whip up a good meal on their own.

Other retreats restricted the use of alcohol, but Kleske was planning a wine tasting 101 session for the 40 women from the Holston Valley Unitarian Universalist Church (HVUUC).
 
Other venues also had lengthy, complicated contracts.   

But the women’s retreat was a simple weekend event, and they just wanted to have fun and relax.

“It was very hard to find someplace that fit all of our criteria,” she said.

Eventually, she found Sugar Hollow Retreat. Now she’s planning her third woman’s retreat there for 2010.

“The beauty speaks for itself. It’s just gorgeous and everyone loves the hikes,” she said. 

The rain is coming down steady today, slowly dripping from the eaves, and watering the wildflowers and lawn behind the Lodge.

Fall is one of the most beautiful seasons, but lately, it’s been pretty rainy at Sugar Hollow.

When it rains, we spend time making sure your Sugar Hollow cabins are shipshape – light bulbs, any minor things that need to be fixed.

But what about you?

Here are 10 ideas to keep you busy if Mother Nature just isn’t outdoor-friendly during your stay with us:

BUTLER, Tenn. -- Ever wanted to be Indiana Jones, searching for treasure?

Got a GPS unit?

Then you’re all set. While you’re spending time hiking, horseback riding and antiquing around Sugar Hollow Retreat, you can also grab that GPS unit and hunt for treasure.

It’s one of many activities at and around Sugar Hollow Retreat, and it’s called geocaching.

There are 923,340 active caches worldwide, and you can take part in your area by searching for treasure at geocaching.com.

Halloween is less than a week away and I still have no idea what to wear.

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. I love the fun of dressing up, the idea of getting scared, celebrating fall with corn mazes and hay rides and of course, rotting my teeth on lots of candy.

I have trouble getting scared at haunted houses these days, but I still love the idea of slinking through the dark, hands out in front of me, hoping some ghoul doesn’t jump out from the shadows and send my heart into my throat.

To that end, I’ve been digging around online to see if there are any good Halloween scares in our area.

BUTLER, Tenn. – When Richard Dugger moved back to Butler from Ohio, he had to drive to Johnson City three times a week for supplies. 

On his drive, he spotted a patch of land with nothing but briers on it. And he had an idea to make things more convenient.

“My husband was bored,” says his wife, Carolyn Dugger, with a laugh.

Whatever the reason, he opened the Dry Hill Store seven years ago.

BOONE, N.C. – Andi Gelsthorpe Peters was at her wit’s end.

She and her fiancée, Rob, had searched high and low all over the North Carolina/Tennessee area for an outdoor wedding venue.

The couple, in their mid-thirties, had each been to dozens of weddings. They didn’t want to drag family from other states only to spend a few hours with them. They didn’t want everyone to drive back and forth from hotels to a rehearsal dinner to the wedding site back to a reception. They wanted to create a sense of community and spend time with everyone for a weekend.

But they couldn’t find the perfect place. Some venues were close, but too expensive or had strict rules.

“Someone wanted $10,000,” she said. “I thought we weren’t going to be able to do this.”

A friend suggested Sugar Hollow Retreat.

“We had passed the signs for it on 321, but we’d never been up there,” she said.

She and Rob drove up the road to take a peek at the 300-acre getaway in the Cherokee National Forest.