Last blog Post Errata

In my last post about our Texas trip, I made a couple of mistakes. First, Aaron says that the queer, dead hominids were Homo Heidelbergensis. The homo part still stands.

Also, I left out one bullet point. We also saw the new Narnia movie, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It sucked. We had to see it, as I am a huge fan of the books and Livy of the movies, but I kind of wished I hadn't. The first two were fairly good retellings of the books, but this one went all awry. Reepicheep and his coracle were done all wrong, and there was this weird evil island with creepy green mist. Not right at all.

Also, this was not a blog erratum, more of a life erratum. Never, ever, ever mention in front of your seven year old that when she is all grown up and living in her own house with her own family, you might move to Texas. This will be bad. Apparently, she was planning to spend half the week with me and half with her dad for the rest of her life. Woops. Much crying and gnashing of teeth. But by promising that she can live with you as long as she wants to and by assuring her that when she 40, she can still have a room in your house even if it is in San Antonio, she was placated. She will want to move out one day, right? Not that I am in a hurry, but I don't want her to live in my basement forever.

Alamo movie was good. A real tear-jerker. Like The 300, but with less muscles. Goodnight.

We Already Went Westward Ho, and I Didn't Blog About It

So, the thing I learned this trip is that if you have another adult with you, when the kid goes to bed, you don't want to be blogging. So instead of really interesting blogs every day, you get a list of all the things we have done so far since we left my mom's and my last blog post.

• Drove from Meridian to Shreveport, LA, listening to The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling.
• Stopped at a park and had a picnic lunch in the COLD.
• Went to Sci-Port, a really good science museum in Shreveport. Livy and Aaron had a blast doing hands on science experiments.
• Watched a documentary on human evolution. Learned that Homo Erectus once buried their dead with pink quartz hand axes. Made lots of gay hominid jokes.
• Drove from Shreveport to Houston, listening to The Long Winter and singing along (well, I did) to millions of classic country songs that seemed appropriate for Texas.
• Stopped at an awesome park that had all the old playground equipment - a merry go round, see-saws, swings, monkey bars, etc. See-sawed for a long time.
• Went to the space center in Houston. Loved it. Very kid friendly with lots of things to do, not just stuff to read. Wish we could go once a week. Livy's favorite was riding the flight simulator. Aaron and I liked the Saturn V rocket best, with its timeline of the Apollo missions.
• Ate dinner with old friends of Aaron's. I hate meeting other people's old friends, but these were actually super nice and entertaining. Had a really good time.
• Drove to San Antonio, finishing The Long Winter and hearing more of The Order of the Phoenix. Also sang many Merle Haggard songs. He sings a lot about jail.
• Walked from our hotel (downtown, yay!) to the Tower of the Americas and looked out over San Antonio.

Now, Livy and I are headed out to an IMAX about the Alamo (which we are going to see tomorrow). Aaron has to work, at least for a while, but tomorrow he can wander San Antonio with us.

Yo! Westward Ho to the Alamo: Day 1 (Indian Mounds, Rattlesnakes, and Family Dinner)

We left Atlanta this morning all covered in snow. Both Atlanta and we were covered in snow as Livy felt the need to dive into it face first right before we got into the car. But, as Lorelai Gilmore says, "It was the snow; . . . it's like catnip."

So, after a fairly long car ride, which included the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and a reading of "Rapunzel" from my new Grimm's Fairy Tales (my Christmas present!), we arrived at the Moundville Indian Mounds. These mounds were built by the same bunch of Indians (the Mississippians) that built Etowah Indian Mounds just north of Atlanta and the Cahokia Mounds near St. Louis that Livy and I visited last year.

We really enjoyed this site, partly because it had so many mounds. They weren't that large, but there were 20! And they were less regulated than the Etowah ones, so we could climb on them as much as we wanted. We wandered all through the large, open grounds, stretching out travel legs, and we ran up and down mounds. The largest had a model of the chief's house on it, and there was a river overlook and some diorama kind of views of life in the Mississippian culture.

The museum was nothing super special; it was new and flashy, but a little too text focused. For museums, I like pictures and artifacts and more bulleted kind of text. We did really enjoy learning that when the Mississippians died, they believed that they would walk along the Milky Way (called the Path of Souls), make their way past winged snakes and ginormous birds of prey, and then reach heaven. Their chiefs got to turn into these winged snakes (which looked a lot like dragons on the pottery) or into underwater panthers. How cool is that? I wanna die and go become an underwater panther.

Also, they also buried the dead sometimes in shallow graves in the floor of their houses. Gross.

Over all, I like Etowah better, mostly because of the fish trap in the river. I am really unreasonably obsessed with fish traps. I have see two, and they were both remarkably cool. Basically, the Indians made these big Vs in the river with rocks so that the fish would get washed right through a small opening into their nets. Sneaky!

The Etowah mounds are larger, but fewer. I can't really remember the Cahokia mounds very clearly because Livy and I were 7 days into our whirlwind trip and very tired. I remember the Cahokia museum being best.

Oh! One more super cool thing about the ramble around and over the mounds: Behind one mound, near a lake formed when the dirt for the mound was carried out, we found a snake! We think it was a rattlesnake, but it was dead. We didn't get close enough to be absolutely sure that it was a rattlesnake or that it was dead, but we got a picture of it that I will post tomorrow night when I have an internet connection and an SD port on the same computer.

After we left the mounds, we drove the nearly two hours to get to Meridian, my home town. We had dinner with my mom and Mimi at Mimi's apartment (leftover Christmas ham and some boiled shrimp!) and then came back to my mom's to spend the night. We leave in the morning, headed west with the sun.

Adios to our Colonial Carpool

Turns out there is this nasty thing called snow that falls out of the sky to plague us. There is a bunch of it in the yard right now. Rumor has it there is more of it spread all over the east coast. Williamsburg is on the east coast. Screw you, snow! Anyway, because of the big storm, we are changing our trip. I cried a bunch because I really had my heart set on Williamsburg, but we finally hit on a plan that makes me nearly as happy.

We are setting out tomorrow for the Alamo! What other name rings with so much adventure? We are going to drive into Texas by the northern route, through Birmingham, Meridian (we're staying tomorrow night with my mom), and Shreveport. We'll go through Dallas-Ft. Worth, down to Austin, and finally to San Antonio and the Alamo. Then, we'll come home by the southern route through Houston, Baton Rouge, and Mobile.

We haven't made many plans for what to do on the way, yet, but we will hunt up good adventures every night in the hotel. We are going to stop at Moundville, AL to see the Indian Mounds tomorrow. The day after tomorrow is still hazy with indecision, just the way I like it.

You'll hear from me on this blog as we travel, and Livy will be posting her pictures. Our new trip name is "Yo, Westward Ho to the Alamo." You have to imagine it with a little bit of a downtown ATL rapper sound; then you'll really understand it. :)