My Summer Vacation Reading List

Purchased this afternoon from Book Man/Book Woman in Hillsboro Village.

The Goblin Tower by L. Sprague de Camp

Continues a semi-tradition of reading Conan-esque books at the beach.

The Road to Damascus by John Ringo and Linda Evans

I'm pretty sure I read some Bolo books a long, long time ago. I think I even played a game based on it on my old Apple //e.

Stardrift by John Morissey

I just took a complete chance on this one since it was old (published 1973) and the blurb on the back caught my eye.

Vacation Wrapup

We got back late Monday afternoon from our trip to Florida. I'm not going to try to write it all up in a coherent story, since I'm on Day 2 of Low Carbs and my brain is not working so well right now. I'm just going to throw it all out there in a series of musings in what is hopefully approximate chronological order.

1. Atlanta is hot.
2. Atlanta traffic still sucks. I-85 at 2pm on a Sunday afternoon and it's still wall to wall cars.
3. The Westin hotel in downtown Atlanta is still missing a lot of windows from the tornado back in March. It's sort of creepy to see that. I didn't see any other signs of tornado damage on the way through.
4. Buckhead has some really large buildings now that weren't there the last time I was in the area.
5. Atlanta had the most expensive gasoline I saw on the trip. The highest was $4.09, but fortunately I didn't have to pay that. The most I paid was $3.98 at the Florida/Alabama state line, so I still haven't had to buy gas for over four bucks yet in my life. I'm sure that's only a matter of time, however.
6. I played Wii for the first time at my friend Dave's house. It's pretty cool. We're going to consider getting one for Christmas. Wii Bowling and Mario Kart were both a lot of fun.
7. I had intended to do a lot of walking on the beach that week, but I ended up mostly sitting on the deck drinking beer with Uncle Gene.
8. My Uncle Johnny and his nephew caught a 7 foot Hammerhead shark while we were there off the pier. Pretty impressive looking. They cooked it up the next day and it wasn't too bad. I'd probably still rather just look at them swimming though.
9. I finished two books out of the four I took with me.
10. I failed to find good fried oysters in my two attempts. They tasted ok, but they were smaller than the tip of my thumb. I tried a few raw oysters that were much better.
11. Dobb's BBQ in Dothan was just terrible. I paid 12 bucks for a platter and it had two small scoops of pork and beef BBQ, along with 3 tiny ribs that had gristle all over them. Marissa got a BBQ sandwich that only cost 3.99 and it had almost as much meat on it. The only thing worth recommending was the hot sauce, but it's not worth going back for.
12. We spent a few hours at Gulf World in Panama City Beach on the day we drove back. It was pretty cool, but at 25 bucks a person I don't think it was quite worth it. The dolphins were the best part, and this was actually the first time I'd ever been to a dolphin show. I guess they need that much per person to pay for keeping them. I can see going there every few trips, but it's not a "can't miss" type place.
13. Panama City Beach has totally let itself get too big by the way. There are condo buildings there that are larger than almost any building you can find in Nashville or Birmingham. I can't imagine wanting to go to the beach and being surrounded by that many people. Mexico Beach, on the other hand, was practically deserted. There were about 15 to 20 families on the stretch of beach we were on, and even the pier was rarely crowded.
14. The Birmingham Zoo is a lot nicer than I remembered it being. We spent about 5 hours there this past Sunday with the whole Hatcher family. They have a better animal variety than the Nashville Zoo, plus they still have the train, which Jack of course loved.

Back from the Beach

My uncle Eugene and my aunt Naomi invited us to stay in a condo that they had rented for the week last week in Mexico Beach, Florida. This happened to coincide with the 4 extra vacation days that work gave out the week before, so we took them up on the offer and left Nashville on Tuesday afternoon.

We stopped in Columbiana for the night, then left the next morning for the beach. I thought it was going to take us about 5 hours to get there, but it ended up taking 7 with all the stops we had to make for Jack. He was good for about 2 hours, then he wanted out of that car seat for a while.

Last year when we went to the beach near Daytona, Jackson didn't care for the sand and the water too much. This year he loved it. My uncles had set up big tents down near the water, and he spent hours out there playing in the sand, or in the small inflatable pool that Marissa set up for him inside a smaller tent. We let him run around in the buff for a while, but his 10 year old cousins seemed to be scandalized by the wanton nudity. Maybe uncle Bull will send him a thong for next year.

Vacations are never long enough, and this one was no exception. We all cleared out of the condo by 9am on Saturday morning, then we took 9 hours to get back to Columbiana. We detoured through Ft. Walton to visit Beasley Park, where Marissa and I got married almost 5 years ago. I get frustrated driving on the coast, since it's soooooo slow and every little town has got a speed trap set up.

We eventually made it back to Nashville. We're going to plan on renting a smaller condo near their's next year and spending the whole week down there since I'll have more vacation time by then.

Check out the pictures on Jack's Blog.