Home Again

We're ba-ack! Following a final round of hotel waffles, my family surprised me by unanimously voting to go to the Tennessee Aquarium rather than Rock City. Our plan was to check out one last big tourist attraction before stopping somewhere in the stretch of mountains and heading home to the cats. The aquarium is very nice and has an amazing section of seahorses, but it doesn't compare to Georgia Aquarium's whale sharks, manta rays, belugas, dolphins and major amazement around every turn. Still, we had a good time. We walked around the river front a while before eating lunch at Cheeburger Cheeburger and heading out of town.

I hadn't really considered it beforehand, but traveling on a Saturday that was also New Year's Eve was excellent. There was no traffic anywhere along our route. We drove ~9 hours without seeing one cop or one accident. We drove through Nashville around 2:30 or 3pm and cruised through without slowing down. We stopped a few times for restrooms, food and gas, but mostly we just drove. And drove and drove... It was an odd drive because there were few cars and even fewer trucks. We passed rest areas and truck stops that normally would have been full to capacity and they had maybe 5 or 6 trucks. The kids were great about the boring drive and the first (and probably last) complaint I heard was when we were near Champaign.

We arrived home around 9:30pm. Logan was determined to stay up until midnight to celebrate the new year. Kaylin's a night owl and it was no challenge for her. By the time we got things unloaded and somewhat put away it was almost 11. I checked my email and immediately fell asleep in my chair. The kids woke me just before midnight. They were watching the Dick Clark ball drop thing. Wow. Dick seems to have improved since last year, but man, it's hard to watch him! We did the Happy New Year celebration and I headed to bed. The country club had their usual fireworks and Gene and the kids went outside to watch. I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

It was nice to get out of town for a few days. We had a great time and now I'm looking forward to several days off at home. I hope to go birding a couple of times and just spend some quality time with my husband and kids. Of course, all three neighbor kids were over by 9am and haven't left and probably never will. We're all missing Duncan, but can't pick him up until tomorrow. It is sort of nice to be able to love on the cats as much as we want without Jealous Dog chasing them away.

Happy 2012!