Road Trip Days 2 & 3...Adventures in Technological Withdrawal...

Let me begin this post by saying that since I had decided to chronical every fun and meaningful moment of our trip on my blog, I started out with a sense of adventure that I might not have felt otherwise.  I wanted to capture everything on camera and really savor it!  So imagine my utter disappointment at waking up two mornings ago (on day 2) at the hotel and not being able to get my computer to boot up properly.  WTF??   I mean, it worked Saturday night, what could have happened while it was logged off during the night to make it malfunction?  I decided to chalk it up to nothing and just try again later when I arrived in Georgia. 

We went off on our merry way, exploring the unknown, seeking out every little out of the way thing that we would otherwise have missed were we in a hurry to reach our ultimate destination...afterall, the point was not just the destination, the point was the journey.  So we had fun and I caught it all on camera...to the extent that my kids were starting to think something was wrong with me at first and then later, they were telling me, "Mom!  Grab the camera!"

We went to Live Oak, FL (a place I went as a kid because my grandfather had a farm there) to see if anything looked familiar...it didn't (it's been 40 years!) but the town is really old and cool, so I took photos of some houses I liked.

With a little TLC...

Look!  It's for sale...future retirement house?

We tried to pick blueberries, but in Live Oak, nothing's really open on Sundays...including the farms.  So instead, the kids posed for a photo op with a cow or two :)

How fun!  We decided to pick some blueberries!

Blueberry farms in Live Oak are closed on Sundays :(

Instead of picking berries, the kids posed with some cows

We ate lunch at Cracker Barrel and then, because we weren't in a big rush, the kids played checkers afterwards and I sat in a rocking chair.

I mean, we even had fun sitting in a traffic jam singing stupid songs and posting updates to my status on Facebook.  (Yes, I was keeping the 10's of people who gave a crap constant updates on every little thing courtesy of my son, who was doing the typing on my phone.) 

And so it was that we eventually arrived in Georgia and I couldn't reach my sister-in-law Cindy who had been due to arrive back from her European river tour the same day.  So I called my other sister-in-law Karin, who, after several failed attemps, finally answered her phone and said, "Weren't you supposed to arrive on the 18th?"  My response was, "Well, yes, what's today?"  To which she replied, "It's the 17th."  To which I responded, "Oh crap!  Are you sure??"  Uh, yeah...I got the days mixed up and left an entire day too early :)

Karin kindly invited us to come to her house, totally uninvited and last minute-like and even fed us really yummy food, which she cooked, for us, after she had worked all day in her yard.  And when I say yard, I mean farm-yard, cause she lives way out in the country and has a huge piece of property with a giant vegetable garden and pastures and a barn.  Yeah..I know, she's fabulous that way, just like Cindy.  Speaking of Cindy, she called us after we had arrived at Karin's...their plane had just landed at Atlanta airport and it would be something like 11 pm before they would be home so we would meet up the next day.

So we invaded Karin's house and I promptly ask if she had wireless and she said no, but she has an aircard on her computer and I could use the aircard to download updates on my computer to try to get it to work and, long story short, none of it worked on my computer, I still couldn't get on.  So she kindly allowed me to use her laptop to post the post about me not having a computer.

So we spent the night at Karin's house and the kids got to ride the ATV with their uncle John and everything!  I slept in a VERY comfortable bed and got a fabulous night's sleep and was ready to get over to Cindy's so the kids could play with their cousins.   Before leaving, I took beautiful photos of Karin's garden and of the humming birds that were buzzing all around her feeders!  She also sent me on my way with some absolutely GIANT zucchinis fresh from her garden.

It was hard to catch the hummingbirds on film!

After arriving later that morning at Cindy's, I promptly tried my computer AGAIN and AGAIN, it failed to boot up.  I asked Cindy where the nearest Best Buy was and she told me it was more than an hour away at which point, I started thinking about when I was going to head out in order to buy a new laptop.  Also, sometime during that whole ordeal, my brother-in-law Hans told me that we couldn't access the internet anyways because they had gone over their monthly allotment and it had been cut off.  Uh, WHAT?  Yeah, apparently, out here in God's country, the internet is scarce and expensive so they put limits on it and if you go over, they will cut you off!!!  Have you ever heard of such a thing?  Oh, and while I'm at it, let me just say that, in addition to the computer not working? my phone also wasn't working, cause apparently, T-Mobile doesn't have any towers out this way, so NO phone, NO email, NO internet, NO blog. 

I wasn't expecting this and I guess I felt a little like a crack head that just got arrested and found out there wasn't going to be any crackberry or any other questionable technological substances coming my way for, like 2 whole weeks!  I was not a happy camper and was having a sort of mini-meltdown and trying not to make an ass out of myself.  I was trying to rationalize and deny...I was bargaining and pleaing.  I offered myself up for slavery to my bro-in-law if he would only allow me to pay for the internet so they would turn it back on and he was looking at me as if I was sick.  I tried to explain...I had plans!  This is part of my relaxing...part of my vacation, this decompressing in print...this bonding with other moms in blogland.

I am not good at sudden shifts in my world.  While I can deal with emergencies by shifting into my "cop mode" I don't deal with change in routines or paradigm shifts as smoothly as some people do.  I know this is not an attractive personality trait, but I recognize and try to deal with this short-coming.  While I was still in panic mode, Hans dealt the final blow..."The internet won't be back on till the next billing cycle cause we went over, period."  Well, okay then, I guess that's it.  No point in buying a new laptop if there isn't going to be an internet connection to connect to.  It started to sink in that I was going to have to re-think this vacation WITHOUT the possibility of blogging every day. 

Slowly, I realized that I could just take all my photos and do it when I got home.  It wouldn't be so bad.  I would probably lose a few readers because of the huge gap in posts, but it would be okay.  I would be okay and would survive without it (phone, computer, etc.) for the next 10 days or so and I would be okay...really, I would!

So Cindy and I decided to make some zucchini bread with the ginormous zucchinis Karin had given me from her garden and I took photos.  Then we ate the bread.  Then we walked out to the chicken coop and I took photos of the chickens, and the goats and later her garden.  As we all sat down to dinner, Hans looked at me and said, "You know, the next billing cycle starts tonight at midnight."  Yes, people!  He had let me think there was going to be no internet for an entire afternoon, just to mess with me!  I just LOVE him!

Guess what Cindy and I did after dinner???  We drove to Walmart and I got myself a brand new netbook (just like the one above, only black...it's so cute and small with a 10" screen) and when I got back to the house, I downloaded all my photos so easily cause it has a card reader!!  No cable needed!  So here I am, back in the land of the connected living, happily blogging about what I am doing on my summer vacation!  I have so many things to tell and show you (from just the last few days!) so I'll be catching up.  I'm going to break it up into several different posts.  I can't wait to show you the gardens and the fun stuff we've been doing.