Anyway, during all the hustle that was kissing my beloved parents goodbye at the airport, getting back to the oppressive heat of mid-summer Texas, and getting back into our routine, my creative juices promptly dried up. So I took a little blogging vacation until the funny came back. And it's back.
So first, let me tell you a little about our trip.
We flew with the girls on a Saturday morning to Charlotte, NC. There are, of course, plenty of the obligatory my-kids-were-so-bad-on-the-plane stories, but if you are a parent and you have partaken of any air travel with your young child, you have a million of these stories of your very own, so I won't trouble you with ours, except to issue a public apology to the guy seated in 3B. There. That's all I'll say on the subject.
We rented a car in Charlotte and went to visit my grandmother who was in the hospital at the time (she's home now, it's all good). My kids have had plenty of experience visiting people in hospitals lately, so this was nothing new to them. What was perplexing to Aria, however, was the relationship between this woman in the bed called Mimi and her Mommy. Aria herself has a Mimi, so she couldn't quite understand why I kept calling my grandmother Mimi, until the very end of our visit when she suddenly says, "Ohhhh! You are Mommy's Mimi! Hi, Mommy's Mimi! I hope you feel better, Mommy's Mimi! Bye-bye, Mommy's Mimi!"
After bidding Mommy's Mimi adieu, we drove up the mountain to Blowing Rock. It's usually a two hour drive from Charlotte, but my husband is of the Potty Breaks are for Sissies variety, so we made it to the mountains in record time. Again, there's a story here, but I'll refrain for now, especially since at a family wedding later in the week, my cousin gave me a bit of a complex when she asked me, after complimenting me on the funny in my blog, if I only wrote about scatological humor.
Go ahead. Look it up. You know you want to.
So, up the mountain sans potty break, to The Wood Shed, my family's mountain home I mentioned in a previous post as being one of my favorite places on earth. And it did not disappoint. We slept with the windows open, listened to the sound of the wind in the trees, and woke with the scent of mountain laurel in our noses. Is this heaven?
And guess what? I even got to put on... in the middle of summer...wait for it... a sweater! Yes, that's how nice the weather was. We sipped coffee in the mornings on the porch watching the golfers, took the girls in creeks hunting for crawdads, and even let Aria play in the sandtraps in the evenings.
Oops, I think my grandfather just rolled over in his urn. He was a stickler for golf course etiquette.
The "men" - Chris, my Dad Poppies, and my brother Kick - played golf two days we were there, while the "girls" - my mother Vivi, sister-in-law Ginny, niece Sassy, Aria, Caroline, and I - went, as you may have guessed, shopping and to the park.
One morning, Dad, Chris, and I even went ziplining down a mountain, which is when we discovered our life was meaningless and without direction before ziplining.
We took two hikes to waterfalls - one, just the two of us without kids remniscent of the days we would just randomly stop on a scenic drive when we saw a bunch of cars parked at a trailhead and put on our hiking shoes and go - and one with the girls, bathing suits and sandals on under our chothes so we could splash in the creeks and look for gold (tadpoles).
One afternoon, Chris and I took Aria trout fishing. We tried our darnedest to catch her a fish, but no luck. Not one bite. We tried everything: lures, corn, deli meat, and at Aria's request, pretzels. Because, using three-year-old logic, everyone loves pretzels. Nothing. To be honest, she's not a fishing fan. Yet. Just wait 'til we go salmon fishing in Alaska when the silvers are running, my love, then you'll be hooked like your parents are. (Yes. I meant to do that).
And then. The pinnacle of our trip to the North Carolina mountains.
Choo Choo!
That's right, Tweetsie Railroad.
If you do now know about Tweetsie Railroad and are not from the east coast, I will forgive your ignorance. The rest of you have no excuse.
Tweetsie Railroad is only THE most exciting, thrilling, breathtaking, heartstopping, exhilarating amusement park in western North Carolina (if you don't count Ghost Town in the Sky, which I don't, since I got beat up there as a fourteen-year-old by three scrawny, scrappy redneck girls, and am obviously still bitter about it, so in my house, we just don't talk about Ghost Town in the Sky).
The whole Tweetsie yarn is based upon this old steam locomotive that once traversed Alaska, and now chugs guests on a scenic tour around a North Carolina mountain hypothetically carting gold, where bandits attempt to hijack the train with guests aboard, and are then thwarted by the good guy cowboys with aid from the Native Americans.
I'll be honest, as a whole, things haven't changed much since I was there as a child in the late seventies, except that back then, the bad-guy hijackers were the Indians, and the cowboys won back the train after shooting all the Indians in the melee. Doncha just love how politically incorrect we were in the seventies? Sheesh. Anyhow, they've built a whole theme park around the train concept, complete with ferris wheel, county-fair-type rides, a petting zoo, and even a chair lift to haul folks up the mountain in the event you have consumed too much cotton candy to walk (we did).
All those adjectives I just used to describe Tweetsie? Those were words I used to describe it when I was seven, which, until last week, was the last time I was there, so in my mind, Tweetsie was still all those things.
When we got there and discovered our three-year-old and even our nine-month-old were permitted to ride each and every ride without restriction, or when the safety harness on an airplane ride vaulting said three-year-old ten feet in the air is a rope you tie around your child, or when the whole family is allowed to board the chairlift which dangles precariously 40-feet in the air with a mere pencil-sized restraining bar - well, I realized just why exactly, as a young child, I considered Tweetsie to be THE most exciting, thrilling, breathtaking, heartstopping, exhilarating amusement park in western North Carolina.
Lack of safety regulations!
It still is breathtaking and heartstopping, for parents, just now for entirely different reasons.
Following our week in Blowing Rock, we drove down to Lake Lure, NC (of Dirty Dancing fame) for my cousin Kerby's wedding to his beautiful new bride, Amber. All the extended family was there: aunts, uncles, cousins, cousins' cousins. It was fabulous. We roasted s'mores by a bonfire on the Lake Lure beach after the rehearsal dinner, and Kerby and Amber got married on a rock bluff overlooking an apple orchard. Stunning. And believe it or not, my two children were the last two kids to leave the dancefloor at the reception.
Nobody puts Baby in a corner.
So that about sums up our trip to the North Carolina mountains. We had a wonderful trip and made wonderful memories with our exceptionally wonderful extended family.
And a note to my cousin Corinna: See? A whole blog post and I didn't mention scat once. Not once.
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