Summer Vacation - Day 3

Day 3 - Heading to SC and Cousin Joyce's

I was awakened this morning by a phone call.

Connie: "Darcy peed in the bed. Come and handle it." 

And we were off! 

We set a time of departure for 11:00 A.M., and we actually stuck to it. We were on the road by that time with Tom at the wheel in charge, no rain forecasted, and nothing but blue skies. We weren't falling for that, however, so the "Weather Tech" luggage carrier was full of luggage wrapped in trash bags....just in case.

My MapQuest directions were pretty simple. Get on 95 to US 17 N and then turn left on Tidwin Rd. and then went on Palmers Ridge where our Cousin Joyce lives. It would be approximately 2 hours and 35 minutes. Our Boston relatives, Maya, Jay, and two children, were coming in by plane and would rent a car and drive from Charleston. They were landing at 10:30 A.M. with about a 40-minute drive. We were hoping to arrive within an hour of each other.

Ha, ha, ha!

We did just fine driving along with only one pit stop at the Mt. Pleasant Welcome Center, but then it was downhill. We hit traffic, and it was stop-and-go as we hit lights and motored along at a snail's pace. Tom was a tad annoyed and even more so at the directions. Past the lights, US 17 was a four-lane road with nothing but a forest of trees on either side. If we saw a drive, it was made of dirt and looked to be headed nowhere. 

We drove into Historic McClellanville and drove out of Historic McClellanville, all in one minute. The town is actually smaller than Dugger, IN. Now you see it, now you don't. We saw a diner, a gas station, and some other buildings of questionable origins. We kept driving looking for Tidwin, but after 15 minutes, we realized we had passed it. We decided to call Cousin Joyce, but alas, we had not brought the phone number. We called Jay instead, and Joyce got on the phone to give directions. They were as follows:

Joyce: (spoken in her true southern accent) "WwwwwEeeeeLlllllLllll. Where are you all? What? You already saw the historic district? Oh, shoot, that was something we were going to do for an activity. Take everyone into the historic district. WwwwwEeeeeLllllLllll. Where are you? Okay, well, you need to turn around and come back on 17. You will get to a light. There is only one light. Yeah, that is the light, turn right. That is Randall Rd. You all just passed Tidwin when you were coming. Well, it is a tiny dirt road. I just didn't think of giving you all directions." 

Me: "Uh..."

Joyce: "I'm sorry, I guess I should have emailed you all some directions. Okay, you are on Randall. WwwwwEeeeeLllll, you travel on that road for about a half a mile. No, more like a mile. It is pretty long. You go on that road for like two miles, and then you will come to what we South Carolina folks call the "five points." When you come to that, you will see a dirt road to your right. WwwwEeeeeLllll there will be two roads to your right with a first road, and then a tad up there will be the second road. They are right together. There will be the first road, but you won't take that road. Well, I don't think I'm explaining that very well. Picture a star. You will want to turn at the point of the star that is toward the bottom. Start at the top of the star, and it won't be the first point to your right, but the second point. Sort of like turning and then having to turn in like a U-turn."

Needless to say, we went down at least 3 of the "5 points" roads until we found the correct way, which led us to Cousin Joyce's driveway. At this point, we realized we were in the middle of nowhere. And I mean nowhere. Joyce had told us she had a bedroom in the house for Connie and a small guest house with a pull out couch downstairs and a bedroom upstairs with a double bed and two twins. We were expecting a bunkhouse with lots of spiders in the windows. Driving down these bumpy dirt roads, we were expecting the worst.

We turned into Joyce's road and traveled toward the house we could see hidden behind trees. Once we cleared the trees, we were in the middle of the most beautiful piece of picturesque property that I have ever seen. It was like something from the movies.

The house is a two-story building with a substantial southern front porch complete with four white rocking chairs, a porch swing, and a hammock.

The inside is decorated with antiques from Joyce and James' childhood. Windows cover the entire house, and each window comes with its own view.

From the large wooden kitchen table, you look out at what Jay and I call the bayou, but in South Carolina, it is a swamp. The most beautiful swamp with trees and hanging Spanish moss. The windows from the living room look out at the guest house and trees with swings for the kids. There is a herb garden and a vegetable garden.

The opposite side of the house looks out at the wooden barn and the pump house, which looks like a little house in itself. The front of the house overlooks the yard and the fenced-in field high with Argentine Bahia grass. There are egrets, hummingbirds, green herons, wild deer, frogs, and alligators.

We sat on the front porch and drank sweet iced tea laced with mint from the garden and fresh shrimp salad. The weather is perfect with a breeze to keep us comfortable swinging on the front porch and no rain in sight.

We talked and caught up and then decided to check out our sleeping quarters. We couldn't have paid for a better place. It is a cottage nestled beneath the trees. We have a living room, a fully stocked kitchen, a laundry room with a bathroom and shower. Upstairs are two bedrooms, one with twin beds, the other with a queen bed and there is a bathroom.

The back door leads to a small porch and rose garden, and it too looks out on the "bayou." The front windows look out on the neighbor's pond, but we are not to trample on to this property, although the call of the hammock hung between two trees.

We sipped mojitos with fresh mint and chowed down on roast beef and veggies from the garden. We talked into the night at the kitchen table as our family is known to do, frogs listening to us as they attached themselves to the windows overlooking the "bayou."

We are seriously in the middle of a magical haven.

Summer Vacation 2007 - Day 2

Day Two- Savannah, GA

Three things I learned today in Savannah - by Darcy (8 yrs. old)

1. There are a lot of horses pulling carriages.

2. The waving girl died of a heartbroken.

3. Eat seafood!!

Three things I learned today in Savannah - by Madison (Ten yrs. old)

1. The waving girl statue was about a girl who stood at the Savannah River and waved a towel to the passing boats. She was waiting for her true love to return by ship. After 4 years, when he didn't return, she died of a broken heart.


2. Eli Whitney came to a plantation in Savannah to tutor the owner's three children. He invented the cotton gin, which picked the seeds from the cotton. It was an invention easily duplicated, so he only sold three of them before other people copied his design.

3. Georgia is known as the Peach State

Before we left Florida, I researched Savannah, a place I've always wanted to visit since reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. One of the things I found was a trolley tour that would take you through 16 stops around the city. You can ride the trolley all day, getting on and off as many times as you choose. Although my husband scoffed at this as he prefers to walk everywhere he goes, we agreed this would be easier for my mother and the children.

The lady at the front desk of our hotel suggested riding the trolley all the way through first, picking out the destinations that would interest us, and returning to debark at said destinations on the second go around. We took her advice.

Our tour guide was Terry. He was an older black gentleman with a sense of humor and quite a bit of knowledge about the city. He had his script and his schtick well-rehearsed. We started out at the Welcome Center and began touring the city.

The city of Savannah is ancient. It was established in the 1700s by James Oglethorpe, a member of Parliament. Savannah prospered with the discovery that certain crops did quite well in the humid heat of Georgia. These crops were rice, cotton, and peaches. Savannah was successfully captured by General Sherman during the Civil War. Sherman sent a telegram to President Lincoln, offering him the city of Savannah as a Christmas present, making it one of the few towns not burned by Sherman during the war.

There were several war monuments around the different 24 squares that the city was built around. One of the statues was commissioned from Canada. The city requested that the finished statue be delivered by ship so that it did not touch any Yankee land in its trip to its final resting place. The figure was then put in the square facing the enemy, north.

Other interesting points of interest in Savannah are the homes of Juliette Gordon Low, the founder of the Girl Scouts. Her birthplace and the house that she lived in after her marriage are two points of interest in any tour, as is the first house of the Girl Scouts. We skipped her birthplace, which is next door to a famous bed and breakfast that once housed Kevin Spacey while he filmed Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." and instead opted to check out the home of Andrew Low II, Juliette's father in law.

Inside the home is a little tourist shop where we watched program detailing old Andrew's life, and by the time it was over, we were doubled over from all of the tragedy that kept striking, not Andrew, but all the women in his life. It was worse than any soap opera.

Andrew married his first wife, and the two of them began work on building this mansion in Savannah, but before they could move in their four-year-old son died, his wife died in childbirth, and his uncle and partner in the cotton industry croaked as well. Poor William moved into this house with his two young daughters and eventually remarried. This wife bore him 5 children, one of whom died right after birth. You would think he would have learned by now to stay the hell away from his wife, but obviously, he was a horn dog because he knocked her up again, and she died during labor just like his first wife!! Connie and I were laughing and crying by the time that miserable saga was finished.

Andrew's son eventually inherited the house, married Juliette Gordon, and moved into the house. Their marriage was a miserable one (of course) because, on the day of their wedding, rice was thrown. Rice landed in Juliette's ear and gave her an infection that resulted in her going deaf. You can imagine where Connie and I were when that was told. Seriously....on the floor. On and on this history went.

We saw the Mercer house, the house in the book and movie, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. We saw the third oldest hospital ever built. We saw the cemetery where Confederate soldiers are buried. We heard of ghosts that inhabit several of the famous houses that line each square. We passed church after church after church. We finally got out at St. John's Baptist Church.

It was built in the 1800s but had recently been restored. We went inside and toured the church. It is beautiful with stained glass windows depicting stories from the Bible, large marble columns, intricate architecture, and starting on one side and circling the entire church are enclaves of the Easter scene of Jesus' trip to the altar where he was nailed to the cross.

Tom began explaining this to Madison, so I turned to Darcy and began teaching it to her. We started at the beginning and went all around the church with me trying to summarize the whole thing, and when I finished at the cross, Darcy looked at me and said:

Darcy: "But I thought Jesus was Santa Claus."

The homes are amazing; old and built exceptionally well. Each is a different architectural masterpiece. We couldn't begin to even see the whole city on our tour. I would have loved to have just walked the town reading every piece of information that is available on signs throughout, but the kids weren't all that enthralled, and Connie could not begin to do that walking.

We ate at a cafe in the Marketplace, and while in the Andrew Low house, it began to rain again. We waited it out for a while (that is how we came to watch the film on his life) and then decided to walk next door to the carriage house that Juliet had turned into the Girl Scouts headquarters. As we exited the Low house, it poured, and we hurried to the office only to find that the door was locked. But for three dollars apiece we could get inside. Yeah, because those Girl Scouts don't sell enough cookies in February and March!

We left and began hiking toward our car. We got as far as the overhang of another church (no entry allowed) where we waited while Tom ran the rest of the 3 blocks to retrieve our car. We were soaked to the skin, but glad we'd made the trip.

Day two ended with dinner at the Cracker Barrel (Connie stayed at the hotel) and a game of Hearts (I won!). Tomorrow we head to South Carolina to visit relatives and tour Charleston.

Summer Vacation 2007 - Day 1

Day One - Savannah, GA

We were an hour off our start time. We were shooting for 9:00 A.M., but figuring out and loading the new luggage carrier took time. Connie had purchased the carrier after realizing that her purchase of a new Rendezvous included changing from her previous bench seat in the middle to bucket seats which eliminated a place in the middle and forced us to drive with the third seat raised, which in turn left us enough room for a cosmetic bag, a bag of shoes and Connie's carry bag of golf clubs in the "trunk" space in the back. 

Thus the carrier.

The carrier is black, soft-sided, and says "Weather-Tech " on the outside. The underside of the carrier is like a soft blanket so that it will not scratch the roof of the Rendezvous. Tom and I figured out how to install the carrier after some deliberating, some arguing, and finally some reading of the directions. 

Once the bag was attached to the roof, Tom loaded my ONE suitcase that contained THREE people's clothing for a month, Connie's suitcase, his suitcase, and a blowup mattress. He insisted that we put in the suitcase full of DVDs and CDs and my carry bag of books, but we protested this, and the carrier was closed and attached to the luggage rack. There was some discussion of taking a test drive through the neighborhood, taking corners on two tires to make sure the carrier held, but that plan was abandoned.

Connie decided that riding in the middle bucket seat with Madison would be a better arrangement than last year's passenger choice. Tom took that seat. I drove, and Darcy rode in the back on the bench seat along with the cooler, three bags of food, the pillows, and the other odds and ends that we insisted that we needed for a month away.

We left Largo at around 10:00 A.M. The weather was beautiful, sunny, hot, and humid. I had MapQuested directions. The trip to Savannah would take 5 hours and 18 minutes. Tom had consulted the instructions on Rand McNally, and it claimed a journey to Savanna would take 8 hours. Since I was driving, I opted to follow my directions. A small heated discussion occurred, but since I had the wheel, I didn't feel any other opinions really counted. 

The driver is also in charge of the radio, and Connie has satellite radio, an added plus. My half of the driving was without incident and really quite calm. Tom read the Sunday paper. Madison and Darcy watched movies on the handheld DVD players Connie purchased, and Connie sat quietly in the back, rubbing her feet, moaning occasionally and crying softly as she was having a painful morning with her neuropathy.

Tom took over the driving after three hours. The weather had changed and was no longer sunny. The sky was overcast and then dark, and it drizzled a tad as we moved north through Florida. 

When we reached Jacksonville, we stopped off at a truck stop that housed a gift shop, restrooms, and fast food joints. Outside the truck stop were three tables with umbrellas. We sat at one of the tables and enjoyed a picnic lunch Connie provided. The entire time we ate, the sky grew darker, and bolts of lightning could be seen in the distance. Thunder rumbled, and we calculated the storm about 4 miles off. The wind picked up as we finished, blowing our plates and napkins around the parking lot and stirring up sand from the road. We hurriedly packed up the car and got back on the road. 

Right into the storm.

It stormed and stormed. Visibility was hard. People were pulling off to the side of the highway without warning, their taillights flashing. Traffic was slowed. 

Tom was a champ. The rain came down in sheets, but we weren't worried. We had the "Weather-Tech" carrier.

The rain stopped when we arrived at our hotel outside of Savannah. We registered, unloaded our bags, and got into our two rooms across the hall and catty-corner from one another. I opened my suitcase and admired my packing job; my clothes on the left, Darcy's in the middle, Madison's clothes on the right. I went to pull out Darcy's pajamas, and as soon as I hit the middle of her stack, I felt water. I dug deeper and found more water. I began to frantically pull out clothes. Wet, wet, wet. 

Some items were soaking wet, and I could wring out the water into the sink. I filled 3 trash bags of wet clothes. I went to the other room and broke the news to Connie. Her suitcase was full of wet clothes too. 

Tom's suitcase and the blowup mattress: bone dry.

Our hotel on the Gateway to Savannah did not have laundry facilities. Tom took the bags of wet clothes and hiked across the street to another hotel and dumped them into a dryer. He then went to the store and bought trash bags to wrap the bags for our trip to South Carolina. 

Just in case. 

While he was gone, the heavens opened up and dropped upon us a storm full of gushing rain, wind, and wicked lightning. It was a couple of hours before we saw Tom again. He was stuck in the laundry room of the hotel across the way.

Day one came to a close with a nice dinner at a local seafood joint dressed in dry clothes, thanks to Tom.

Because I Made Them Do It....

We spent three days of our Spring Break at Ft. Wilderness in Disney World. Definitely my kind of camping with its pre-fabricated cabins with running water, beds, a bathroom, and a refrigerator, not to mention the deck and grill. We tried to cram everything in those three days. Here it is through the eyes of a 7-year-old, an 8-year-old, and a 10-year-old:

Darcy: "We're going to the Magic Kingdom today. We are with Savanna. We came to Disney World yesterday, and we were happy when we saw our cabin. We have a bunk bed, and I am sleeping on the top. I am going to It's A Small World, and I can't wait because it is a fun ride. I love it here."

Savanna: "Today, we went to the Magic Kingdom. We went to the Crystal Palace, and we went on the It's a Small World ride. We also shopped for Disney Crocs. I love those. Later while at the campfire, I lost my tooth. Losing a tooth at Disney is exciting because I got Disney stuff from the tooth fairy. It was very fun. Tomorrow we're going swimming. I can hardly wait."

Madison: "Today we went to the Magic Kingdom. We went on many rides and watched shows, including The Hall of Presidents, It's a Small World, and Stitch's Great Escape. My favorite ride is It's a Small World because it is a happy ride. For lunch, we ate at the Crystal Palace, a buffet where we saw the characters from Winnie-the-Pooh. At night, we went to the campfire and roasted marshmallows. We also watched the Princess Diaries II movie. It was a Great Day!"

General Hospital Rant

I began watching General Hospital in high school when my friends Kelly, Robin, and Kelly's sister, Kathy, introduced the soap opera to me. At that time, Laura had just killed her mother's lover, David. I was hooked.

My dream was to one day write for the soap opera. That never happened, but they certainly could use me now. First, they ax Stuart Damon and now this hostage/fire/explosive situation they have going on. I must rant...

Cons:

• What was with the whole of Luke getting arrested episode? I mean, if he was eventually going to get out and play vigilante, why not just let him do that in the first place? And seriously, I know that Luke would have gone in search of Jason to be his back up instead of his pill-popping I' m-a-play-by-the-books lawman son. He has to know that Jason has Sonny's back…..HELLO!

• What have they done with poor Mac? He is pushed aside by the District Attorney, and he says, "Oh, okay?"

• And what is with the DA coming in and running a hostage situation in the city? I'm sorry, but what training has he taken as a lawyer to just go in there and push aside the police commissioner and start running the PC police department, not to mention the SWAT team? Where is Mac's second in command? Where is the SWAT commander?

• Robin has absolutely NO pain while they are cutting into her with a paring knife, sticking fingers inside her wound to find the bullet, sewing her up, and wrapping the wound with duct tape? And then when the pain does hit, she can carry on a conversation and THEN stop the pain with vodka? I don't think so…

• You can't tell me that those masks are not itchy and bothersome. I understand why they can't remove them, but how about the guy in the vault with Maxi? If he could only see how ridiculous he looks sitting there talking to her with that mask on…

• Why doesn't Mr. Craig shoot Robin in the head and end the whole "she needs to go to a hospital" whining? And then finish off poor Allan. Does he really want to watch a man have a heart attack? If those two were dead, the others could focus on poor Elizabeth and her baby.

• "Well, I am the DA in Port Charles, and right now I have a serious hostage situation on my hands because I am the DA and I have taken over this hostage situation because I don't think the Police Commissioner can keep his head together since his niece has been shot, but right now I have to run off to the hospital because my soon to be ex-wife has been admitted and I can get in some licks while she is down?" I don't think so…

• Oh, and now the Mayor of Port Charles is thinking he will come in and take over the hostage situation….. He obviously took the hostage negotiating class with the DA.

• How about all those citizens of Port Charles crossing the yellow line to talk to the police? And what do they do when one of those citizens irritates them? They handcuff him to a pipe? Now that is some police work, huh?

Pros:

• How cool was it when they spray painted the windows?

• Carly is the best female soap character on TV. She may be scared, but she isn't going down without a fight. How funny was she telling Robin that she had better not die and leave her for everyone to blame? 

• Yeah, for Sam! I loved it when she held that knife to Mr. Craig's throat. It wasn't the best thought out plan, but her getting mad enough to pull it out when he baited her was believable. Too bad it didn't work. 

• Alan going into cardiac arrest amidst all of the shooting was believable.