Farewell Summer!

As I may have mentioned a time or two, this summer my brand new computer crashed.  It started acting up in late June doing funky things like shutting down automatically while I was blogging, facebooking, searching the web, etc.  In the end, we skipped shipping the computer to Texas for diagnostics and repair and just asked a good friend to scrub it clean and rebuild it.  VOILA…I’ve got a new computer with upgrades that are better than the stuff originally installed!

Which brings me to my point…when we left for a family vacation in mid-July, I was hoping praying that the computer would sort of fix-itself by not being used for several weeks.  In fact, the computer was even sicker upon my return and basically couldn’t even be turned on.

Fortunately for all of you me, all of our summer vacation pictures were backed up to an external hard drive.  Whew!!!  So as a farewell to summer, I thought over the next few days I would share with you our fantastic driving trip through the southeast portion of the United States and our return trip home.

Enjoy!

Day 1:  St. Louis, Missouri to Shelbyville, Tennessee

We left Kansas City and stayed overnight with my parents in St. Louis.  St. Louis is a good jumping off point for us when we travel east.  It allows us to shave almost 4-hours off of any trip we take to the South.

My kiddos with my mom.

 

My mom and me.

My kiddos with my dad.

My dad and me.

Mary on an authentic, old-fashioned teeter-totter (or if you prefer, see-saw).  She loved this!!!  Ben was terrified and would not sit on it.  This play area was part of a rest-area in Kentucky.  It was really beautifully landscaped.

This is the reason why the packaging on Crayola Markers says, “ages 3 and up”.  Notice very little marker on the COLORING BOOK  pages!

I’m thinking about allowing Ben to do his own make-up for Halloween.  He is quite the make-up artist if you give him a couple of markers!  This is his “street fight” look!

Does this house look familiar?  It might if you’ve ever seen the movie, The Green Mile.  This was the Warden’s house where they took John Coffey to cure the warden’s ailing wife.  This home is located in Shelbyville, Tennessee.

 

A view from the street.  The reason the above-picture is crooked is because I quickly snapped the picture.  I didn’t expect our hostess to actually drive UP the homeowner’s driveway, and I was laughing and screaming that we needed to get off of their property before someone really did come out with a shot-gun…this is the South ya know!

Our hostess for the night, Miss Sheila, provided an exciting evening of entertainment for our little ones.  Her sister owns a horse farm and graciously allowed for our kiddos to have a horse ride. She also raises peacocks which delighted both Mary and Ben.

Mary wasn’t too hip about sharing her horsey ride, but did smile for the camera!!!