What a Nutty Day!

We got to sleep in a little bit this morning, though the sleep was not uninterrupted. These cabin mattresses are mattresses in the loosest sense of the term. One of the standout events of the early morning was that as I wandered down the winding trail to the bath house, the rain waited until I was halfway along to let loose and render me uncomfortably damply clad.

We had a catch-as-catch can breakfast (granola bars! fruit in Jell-O! bananas! Yes, we are health nuts) and hit the road again a little after 8, after we had purchased a few postcards and consumed life-improving free coffee in the camp office.

This would prove to be one of the less-exciting portions of the trip, as the day was consumed in a great deal of driving. Bleh. We did listen to one of the boys' favorite books on audio CD--Hank the Cowdog in the Case of the Tender Cheeping Chickies. It was very amusing and helped the time pass.

We stopped for lunch in Dothan, Alabama, whose claim to fame is being located within the region where the majority of the States-grown peanuts are farmed. There were supposed to be a few peanut-related attractions, such as the gold peanut in front of the Information Center, a monument to George Washington Carver, and statuary peanuts decorated and gracing various points in town.

We admired the shimmering four-foot gold peanut and the lovely little Information Center, and then bundled the starving children (ours) into the car and headed for McAlister's, where Chris tempted gastrointestinal fate by consuming a second Reuben in as many days. I had a Greek salad which was adequate, while the boys opted for nachos ("No salsa??") and pizza ("I thought it would be bigger."). I rated the experience a 7.5, which would have been higher had there been any form of cream/creamer/white paint available with which to lighten my coffee.

We also saw Dothan's other claim to fame, the World's Smallest City Block.

From there, we hunted the elusive artistic peanuts. We eventually found one dressed as a firefighter, but we only got a picture of half of him (I said they were elusive, shy creatures). We also found some other spurious peanuts keeping company with a bunny who was sitting atop an egg in...well...goo. This disturbed us all so much that we subsided in giddy and hysterical hoots.

The George Washington Carver monument also remains only a spurious figure in the mist, as we found no signs and no monument anywhere in sight. Chris was free with expressing his disappointment.

Finally, we pulled into the KOA in Perry, Florida, and were assigned a lovely cabin, K1. We enjoyed a pizza dinner at a local Pizza Hut with an incorrect menu and PostModern wait staff who apparently couldn't decide whether they loved us to pieces or wished we would go away so they could have a good gossip in the back room.

After dinner, Steven and I bought postcards, and then we all trooped down to the pool, where we made every attempt to submerge as much surface area as possible in the pool water to ward off mosquitoes. I also got bitten by an ant, thus being reminded why I have never chosen to live in Florida. I was further reminded of this when I almost stepped on a bug that was at least the size of my ear.

We ended the evening by writing several postcards and trying to figure out whether sitting on Andy would make him less hyper. On the plus side, both of the boys are rating the vacation high, and tomorrow promises manatees!