dispatch from the road

Well, it's been three very long days of travel, but we've finally made it to the coast. We left on Friday, then spent the night in Cave City, Kentucky. After a restless night's sleep (during which the boys somehow decided that "two queen beds" meant that mom would sleep in one and dad in the other, dividing the boys between them), we headed out to see something truly amazing: Mammoth Cave. We took a tour of part of the cave, which felt great compared to the heat of the day, and it was really beautiful and big and kind of scary (according to the boys). Most of the pictures I took inside the cave didn't turn out, but here are a few from the morning:

When we got out of the 54-degree cave and into the 90-degree-plus outer world, my camera fogged up. Too bad, because I loved some of those shots!

So once we were all caved out, we hit the road again for Atlanta and stayed Saturday night with my Uncle Matt, who was an incredibly good sport to put up with the five of us overnight. We had planned to visit Stone Mountain Park Sunday morning, but the boys voted unanimously to skip it in favor of just getting to the ocean already. So that's what we did. Most of today was spent driving through the great state of Georgia, which I can report has a lot of trees, at least along its many byways. We got here at 4:00, did some unloading and grocery shopping and settling in, then set out for the beach. Luckily, there is only one house between our cottage and the ocean, so it was a pretty short trip. Somewhat unluckily, a storm was rolling in, so we didn't get to stay very long. The tide was rolling out, so we looked around for seashells, and did some wading, then the rain started and forced us back inside. Hopefully we'll have better luck tomorrow.

Back at the cottage, Mike made the boys' favorite meal for dinner, a little dish we call "pasta forticus." It's pasta (of course) with pesto and fresh spinach and diced tomatoes and some kind of meat -- usually sausage. But today Mike made it with fresh locally caught shrimp, and it was delicious. We were watching The Lion King, which all the boys had somehow escaped seeing, and after dinner, they dropped out one by one. First Henry, who was perfectly happy to go straight to bed after dinner and didn't give a crap about the fate of Simba and company as long as he got his pacifier. About a half hour later, Max finally admitted that he wouldn't make it all the way through the movie and called it a night after making us promise to rent it so he could see the end. Liam made it all the way through, but barely, and went straight to bed as soon as the opening credits started scrolling. All in all, I'd say it was a pretty successful (if short) first day.