Vacation Log: Day 1 1/2

I get that I've already let you down by not posting last night on the first 1/2 day of our vacation, but you'll understand, I promise. Remember that little water problem we had in the camper that I was content to let slide because I didn't see rain in the forecast? Well, Joe, being the incredibly responsible Flamingo that he is, decided to fix it:





But that's not why we didn't leave at 3:00 like we planned. Note that in the photo above, it was still raining, as it had been for the previous 72 hours, so Joe rigged up a tarp to keep the camper roof dry while he worked on it and that took a good deal of time. But that's not why we didn't leave at 3:00 like we planned either.

While Joe was up on the camper roof he leaned/fell/tripped onto the cover for the air conditioning and it shattered into about 36 pieces. So we spent a good deal of time trying to tape it back together (yes, with duct tape, but not the kind of duct tape that is currently holding my mom and dad's coffee machine together -- real duct tape). That didn't work because the broken pieces of the air conditioner were like the pieces of a monochromatic 3-D puzzle that takes neurophysicists entire semesters to put together. And that may have contributed to our leaving late.

But it was the having to drive an hour out of our way to get to Camping World by 6:00 p.m. to buy a new air conditioning cover that actually made us so late in leaving -- 6:15 to be exact. We were smart enough to take the ladder with us to Camping World so that Joe didn't have to pull up next to someone else's camper that had a ladder attached to it, climb it, and then jump to the top of our camper (though wouldn't those have been some great photos?). Here he is having completed his repair (note that he also brought the drill with him -- always thinking ahead, that Joe):



And in case you can't tell, he's smiling. I know -- I don't get it either -- he's usually still very cranky at this point in our trip -- we haven't even really left town yet. Weird.

So we got to YaYa and PopPop's at 12:30 a.m. last night -- and get this -- the children never went to sleep. They got in bed at 1:00 a.m. And then they woke up at 6:05 a.m., on their own. In the big scheme of things, that's great, because they then woke us up and we left by 8:30-ish. But in the little scheme of things, what in the heck?

We stopped at several interesting tourist attractions today on our way to the mountains: the BP Gas Station on the outskirts of my parents' town, the Burger King somewhere near Augusta, GA, the Rest Area just over the North Carolina State line (Mace could not figure out why he was having to work so hard to walk up the sidewalk to the restrooms and we realized it was because he's just never had to walk uphill before), and the caboose in Alston, Georgia (and their volunteer fire station):





We did eventually make it to the mountains and to my camp reunion. Did I tell you that Joe and I got married at the chapel at this camp lo' those many 13 years ago? Here's Joe contemplating the last 13 years of our life together outside the chapel where we got married:



He's at a loss for words, don't you think? What he's really thinking about is how he's going to have to walk our two kids around for the next hour while his lovely wife of nearly 13 years sits in that chapel with a bunch of crazy camp alumni singing songs like "A Man Without A Woman" and "Give Me A Man Who Is Tall Dark and Tan." So how, how, can that possibly count as a vacation?