Today was a perfect day. We are finally getting some fall weather here and it is glorious. Today’s high couldn’t have been more than 60 with not a cloud in the sky.
Bobby ran errands for a few hours today while Elise and I stayed back at the trailer for school. Before we started that portion of our day, though, we took a bike ride around the lake. We startled a few male mallards out from under a dock, but otherwise left the wildlife unharmed. We found a large downhill on the far side of the lake that thrilled Elise. She screamed and yelled the whole way down as only the young can. Part of our ride was spent discussing friendships and how tricky they can be. She has had a few challenges in the past with kids who pulled the, “You can only be my friend if you aren’t friends with ______.” She doesn’t roll that way and she is very good at standing up for herself, but that doesn’t make it easy. So we talked about how important it is to not dwell on the negative aspects of people’s behavior. That even if it’s someone we know we’ll never be friends with, to respect them and be polite to them. I told her that’s the harder part. She said, “Yeah, it is.” As we were riding around talking about this, I prayed I’d never forget this moment. It was so awesome to have this conversation.
School followed our bike ride. We made it through writing postcards to the grandparents, handwriting and history before we needed a break. I made lunch and we ate outside at the picnic table in the bright sunlight. After lunch, we plowed on through math, reading and spelling. Bobby got home during math and I had to assure him that we had been having a wonderful day up until this time because Elise had just crashed. I guess it was too much school at once. But we got so much done! I was really thrilled with our school day.
After school, we all went for the bike ride around the lake. This time we succeeded in repeatedly annoying a great blue heron. He was in the shallows at one end of the lake when we first surprised him. He flew away to the other end and when we made it around to that side, he flew away again. The third time he squawked at us to let us know he was none too pleased. With apologies to the heron, we stopped after two times around. Bobby wanted to see how long it would take him to ride around the lake as fast as he could, so Elise timed him. I guess he’s missing his Atlantis more than I thought he would! He made it around in just over 4 minutes and he has just now regained his breath (4 hours later).
Elise and I drove up to the campground office to get some firewood for a late afternoon fire. I actually let Elise steer part of the way up and back. She had a great time and commented, “I’m pretty good at this, huh?!” Nothing like empty campgrounds to help train a young driver.
The fire at the edge of the cliff.
Our fire was great. We sat around and watched the sunset and people walking around the lake. When it got dark, we sang some songs: “Soon and Very Soon”, “Titanic”, “There Were Three Jolly Fishermen”, “Found a Peanut”, “I Live Uppy in a Teeny Weeny Housy” – all the classics! By this time, the air was very chilly and the furnace had already kicked on inside the trailer. So we moved the party indoors. We finished the evening with soup and salad at the dinette listening to Bill Harley’s Town Around the Bend. For all you parents out there, here is an unsolicited plug for an amazing storyteller. We have been listening to Bill for over 4 years now. He is a very wise man and incredibly talented. His CDs are filled with stories (some 20 minutes long, some 5) and songs. There hasn’t been a single instance that I have felt uncomfortable with the content and there have been plenty of times that I have laughed and cried. Get one of his CDs for your child (or yourself) this Christmas. You won’t be disappointed.
Now we are at the dinette and Elise is cozily ensconced in her bed, dreaming of crazy daddys that ride their bike too fast and the friendly dragon who lives in the woods. Bobby is reading, I am blogging and we are both enjoying a delicious drink we just invented with hot chocolate and Bailey’s Irish Cream. Like I said, a perfect day. Here’s wishing you one soon.
Sorry for the lack of entries due to Thanksgiving lethargy and a lack of usable WiFi at Mississippi libraries. We’ve post-dated a few entries below. Check ‘em out!
Yesterday in Vicksburg, Elise bought herself a paper doll book of Robert E. Lee and his family. She spent most of today’s car trip to Ruston, LA cutting out all of the figures and clothes. My experience of Elise is that she does not like paper dolls. We have tried paper dolls a few times and she tends to lose interest in them before they are all cut out. This particular variety drives me crazy. Instead of being perforated, they require you to cut out everything. I helped Elise cut but she is quicker than I am and now her knuckles are sore from holding the scissors. We just need Bobby to make some stands for the dolls using the scraps (because, of course, they don’t provide them) and then we can actually play with them!
We arrived at Lincoln Parish Park this afternoon around 4:15 and already love it. Our site is on a small rise above the lake. Looking out our door, all we see is lake and woods. Perfect. There is a bike path that goes around the lake and a hiking trail through the woods that we plan to explore in the next few days.
Campgrounds, and the towns they are in, generally fall into one of two categories for me. One is a place where we have things to do — people to visit, some touristy thing to see, etc. The other is where the campground is the destination. There’s really nothing else to do but enjoy where we are and relax. This campground is the second kind. We need to run a few errands and do some laundry, but those are pretty much our only goals.
We need to have school, too. School on the road is tough. Yesterday we went to Vicksburg, which was an educational event in its own right. Elise earned yet another Junior Ranger badge. Today we took it easy in the morning — played on the coolest playground any of us have ever seen — and then drove here to Ruston. Sometimes Elise does school work in the car (reading mostly), but not all the time. So finding time for school is harder than I thought it would be. If I can get in a few days a week, I’m happy. But it doesn’t always work out that way. Oh, well. We’ll do the best we can and go from there!
Yesterday we went to Vicksburg. We saw the Mississippi River. We are staying in a nice campground. At the Vicksburg Military Park I saw the monument for Texas. I also saw the Illinois Monument. It was huge and had a big hole in the middle of the top. It was great for echoing and making sounds from Lord of the Rings. By the way, that’s my new big movie.
Inside the Illinois Monument
I bought a paper doll book about Robert Edward Lee and his family. I miss you guys.
We spent most of our day in Vicksburg National Military Park. It’s a huge park forming the northern and northeastern borders of the city. The park preserves much of the landscape and earthen fortifications around which the Confederate and Union troops clashed during the seige of the city.
The Shirley House viewed from the Illinois Monument.
The strange thing about battlefield parks is how lovely they are: rolling, grassy expanses interspersed with elegant, mature trees and stone monuments. It almost makes you think it was always this way. You have to remind yourself that while the basic topography is preserved the view in 1863 was quite different: muddier, more strewn with debris, louder, the air charged with nervous, fearful energy — and all of that before the battles.
A relief from the Missouri Monument.
A tunnel built by Union soldiers as part of their efforts to assault the ridge in the distance.
The USS Cairo, the first ship ever sunk by an electrically detonated mine. Recovered from the Yazoo River.
I was last here when I was 10. We had come down to celebrate my great grandmother’s 100th birthday then. I am 90 years younger than her less two days. Nearly half of my mom’s family was from Vicksburg and many lived on or near Fort Hill. We drove down the Hill from the park side, but I couldn’t quite remember the houses. My great grandmother’s house has since burned down (it was on a nearby road too). When I visited it at age 3, her youngest son lived there and I stood on a fire ant mound. I discovered this by the frenzy of ants climbing up my legs and biting me. Nothing preserves memory like a trauma!
There are almost no relatives left in Vicksburg, and I hadn’t been here since the casinos arrived. This makes the place seem a little forlorn. Shelby Foote, among his lauded writings about the Civil War, wrote a book on the siege of Vicksburg titled, The Beleaguered City (also the name of a Longfellow poem). It feels that way to me now. Even the Mississippi River avoided the city after the end of the Civil War. It changed course in 1876 and now only touches the southwest corner.
This cannon was mounted to protect the city from invading casinos. Alas, to no avail.
There is a nice town center and many historical buildings, some well preserved, some in desperate need of preservation. It’s too bad a real industry hasn’t established itself here. I would love to see this city experience a true renaissance. Unfortunately, gambling is such a blood sucker industry. Just as lumber is a key ancillary industry to homebuilding, gambling’s key ancillary industry is pawn shops. We saw more than a few. We saw a billboard (for a Shreveport, LA casino, I think) that said it was voted the luckiest casino in the state. At the bottom it had a number to call if you are a gambling addict. What number do you call if you want a big, cosmic boot to come down and punt all the casinos into the Gulf of Mexico?
Darn! We coulda stayed here!
Thanks to much fun and wonderful hospitality, our week with Colin, Jacquie, and the girls flew by. We realized, though, that we had to actually leave, so that our year about would include other states besides Florida. We made good time yesterday on a drizzly drive to Beaumont, MS, near Hattiesburg.
We overnighted at Lake Perry SFL (i.e., State Fishing Lake — there’re lots in MS). We are the only ones here. Spending the night in a quiet state park that we have all to ourselves beats Wal-Mart any day of the week and is easily worth the $15 fee. The only catch was backing up the trailer in the rainy dark. Both Danine and I had little patience for the task, but managed it and are still on speaking terms! So that’s good.
It rained all night. The rains sounds nice on the trailer except when it gathers into big drops on the branches above and falls with a bang on our little skylight. This is no problem for Elise, who, once asleep, cannot be awoken by mere noise. That’s her superpower. “Is it a log? Is it a rock? Is it a possum playing dead? No! It’s Sleeper Girl!” Not sure how she fights crime though.
The rain helpfully confirmed that I finally sealed the leak on the front street side of the Airstream. Unfortunately, there is still a very small leak on the opposite side! A little damp line can be felt where the carpet and wall meet on Danine’s side of the bedroom. It only gets wet in either of two circumstances: driving in the rain or eight or more hours of constant rain. Luckily, I have three cannisters of special UV resistant caulk and a caulk gun. I’m thinking of having the trailer entirely coated in an inch of black rubber, similar to the Kursk. This will also make it very hard to detect underwater.
How fast does a troll go?
One of the things I have missed the most being on the road, believe it or not, has been watching football on the weekends. Not that I really did it that much while we lived in Falls Church, but there is something very satisfying about plopping yourself down in front of the TV on a Saturday afternoon to watch some college ball.
This weekend we availed ourselves of my brother’s 92″ front projection high definition television and watched game after game. Va. Tech beating UVA today was very sweet. Having gone to Tech (my brother and I), we were completely psyched to see the Hokies soundly defeat the Cavaliers. The best game we have seen so far was the LSU/Arkansas game. 3 overtimes! Colin had TiVo’d the game so we were able to fast forward through commercials, which helped speed things up. Unfortunately, he didn’t record long enough (who expects 3 overtimes?!) so we missed the last 4 plays of the game. But we heard they were great!
Tomorrow (Sunday) we leave here and head to Mississippi. It has been great to be with family and I’m sure Elise will go into complete kid withdrawal as soon as we leave here. But we’ve just got to get out of Florida!!
A lovely spot for courtesy parking.
We are relaxing and recuperating at Danine’s brother’s home. Jacquie and Danine have gabbed non-stop, the girls have been playing, and I got up on the roof of the trailer yesterday and did some caulking, hoping to fix the leak we discovered in Bahia Honda. Last night, helpfully, it rained hard and we found that the leak is still not fixed. So it’ll be back up on to the roof tomorrow.
Tea with Gracie, Elise and Katie.
Although we hadn’t committed to spending holidays with family at the start of the trip — and we still expect to be at Padre Island for Christmas — it’s great to be with family for Thanksgiving. Jacquie has been cooking almost constantly since we arrived, and all she has produced has been delicious.
Last night we went in the hot tub and pool, switching quickly between both. The hot tub was about 90 degrees, the pool 65. None of the adults went into cardiac arrest, so that’s good. The girls are hardier than us. They played Titanic. There’s nothing like a game of pretend that involves hypothermia. Whoopee!
We are grateful for family — in fact, being on this trip has brought out a fair amount of thankfulness all around. We are thankful for the beauty we’ve been seeing every day and the family and friends we’ve seen along the way, and everyone who has supported us with emails and packages and comments. Discovering gratitude is as worthy a reason to take a trip like this as any. It may be the best reason.
Today we are heading to my brother Colin’s for the week. He is a squadron commander at Eglin AFB and we will be staying with him and his wife and 2 girls. Katie and Grace bracket Elise in age and she is VERY excited to have time to play with her cousins. We will be there through Thanksgiving and we are really looking forward to seeing family. But first, stitches have to come out. Say a prayer for us Monday afternoon. Elise is really worried they will hurt as much coming out as they did going in. We have tried to convince her that the hard part is over, but have met with limited success.
Another aspect of this visit I am particularly looking forward to is . . . mail! Every now and then we get a big batch of mail from home and I love it! Friends have asked us how we get mail and it goes something like this. About one and a half to two weeks out, we find a place where we know we are going to stay for more than two days. Then we try and find a relatively small post office nearby. Once we have located it, I call or email my parents and let them know the address. They package up whatever has accumulated at their house in a flat rate Priority Mail box that we already paid the postage on (thanks for the idea, Rich!) and they send it to us at the assigned post office, general delivery. We always call the post office to let them know that some packages are coming and they hold on to them until we get there. We have done this twice and it has worked fine both times.
This time, my brother and his family are acting as our post office. Mom sent three packages earlier this week, my sister sent one, a friend sent another and we ordered a bunch of stuff that is going there (Christmas is just a month away, after all, and it’s hard to Christmas shop for the people you are constantly with!). One of the things I ordered was our Christmas cards. You are going to be getting one and we would love one from you (hint, hint). Just send it to my parents’ address. (Incidentally, this is where you can send us any mail, not just Christmas cards!) If we sent you a card in August with an address on the back of it, that’s my parents’ address. Use that. If you can’t find it, email me. I’ll get it to you. We want to put our Christmas cards up in the trailer so we can think of you all this Christmas. We already have one up thanks to Uncle Matt and Aunt Irene! So come on, help paper the Welshes’ trailer this Christmas! We’d do it for you.
St. George Island is beautiful. It is on the panhandle of Florida, south of Apalachicola National Forest. It is one of the best beaches on the gulf coast for finding shells. Friday we went for a beach walk and found seven intact sand dollars. Only five made it back to the trailer, though. Fairly delicate, they are!
To get to the island, you have to cross a bridge that is at least three miles long. You can tell that there used to be another bridge across the water, but it is now defunct. The old sections that stick out from the land on both sides are now piers and you can still see parts of the bridge in the water, now islands. I was driving when we were on our way here Thursday. On the middle of the bridge, Vicky (our GPS) suddenly said, “Recalculating”. She says this when we have made a wrong turn and she needs to redirect us. Startled, I looked at her and realized that she expected us to be on the old bridge and that she thought we were actually in the water. I guess her software needs to be updated!
We got to the island at just the right time, too! Apparently they are having a High Council of Grills this week!
Be sure to check our Flickr site for more pictures. Just click the picture in the sidebar on the right. Oh! And our Google Map is over there in the sidebar too. Try it.
We found sand dollars on the beach Friday. They were my first whole sand dollars that I’ve ever collected. We found one big one and only 2 did not make it back to the trailer.
I had to get 6 stitches in my chin and they HURT! I was swerving toward two squirrels who were standing stock still on a campsite. The campsites were concrete. I didn’t actually make it to where the squirrels were because I was swerving too much. My bike tilted over and fell. I think my hand hit the ground first and then my chin, but I’m not sure. My mom was at the trailer and my dad was at the bathrooms. Luckily, the screen door to the trailer was open and my mom heard me. I walked a little bit and called my mom because it hurt IMMENSELY. I walked the bike until she came running. We dabbed my chin and then my mom went to the camp office and asked where a hospital was. We went to the adult hospital and then across the street was where the kid’s hospital was, called Children’s Express. We waited and I watched Disney channel for about 5 minutes. We got the stitches done. When the doctor put in the needle, it poked. When he pushed in the medicine, it burned.
We went out to dinner to Subway.
We miss you!
