Service, Sand & Southern Food

We finally got back to Mississippi again!  The timing was less than ideal considering gas prices, but I'm glad we went.  It's hard to put a price on family relationships, and we hadn't seen most of the Mississippi crowd for about five years.  We stayed with Terence's mom, and got to see his dad as well as aunts and uncles and cousins.  There was plenty of southern cooking to go around!!  (And everyone was kind enough to make sure there was at least something S would eat, usually chicken strips-- I thought M was a picky eater but S is in another category altogether.)

Terence and the boys worked hard every morning (and sometimes into the afternoon) getting Grandma's garage organized.  They sorted through piles of stuff and restacked it, installed shelving and made runs to the "pitch-in" (a new term to me, it is basically a dirt lot off the highway with several dumpsters where the locals take their trash instead of a service coming to their house).  They also built the dog run and installed deer fencing around the garden.  K and S and I staked solar lights along the driveway and porch, and both girls lavished attention on the dogs.  Hopefully we earned our keep!  :)  

We attended church near Jackson and that was a little piece of home.  Every trip to Mississippi since I married Terence we have attended a different congregation, and every time we are welcomed and drawn right in.  Though when they always ask hopefully if we are considering moving there, I'm still not tempted.  Arizona is definitely home, and I have no itch to relocate.

Since we were heading all the way across the country, we decided to add in a new destination.  We narrowed it down between Dollywood in Tennessee and Orange Beach in Alabama, and the kids voted for the beach instead of the amusement park.  Our hotel was right on the shore, and we had a balcony room that looked out over the gulf.  It was so beautiful!!  The sand was the softest sand I ever experienced, and not too hot to walk on barefoot.  The water was warm, though the waves were so wimpy they could hardly be considered waves, and we enjoyed it quite a bit.  It was strange for this San Diego-bred girl to have sea turtles and fish swimming right next to us though.  I don't remember that from my beach days as a kid.

The drive to get there and back was looooooong.  And J was not a fan of all the bridges when we took the I-10 all the way to Alabama.  (I was not a fan of getting stuck in a traffic jam on the bridge heading into Baton Rouge, since I was unlucky enough to be driving through that stretch.  UGH!!!  Who designed that mess and why hasn't it been updated?)  The highlight of the drive was visiting our first Buc-ee's in Texas.  Holy giant gas stations, Batman!!!  It was an amazing place-- B called it a mix of Walmart, QT, and the mall.  I had an incredibly tasty brisket sandwich.  But the place was packed.  Crazy amounts of people.  Good thing it was huge!

It was our first real vacation since the pandemic restrictions lifted, and one of the things we had to adapt to was staffing shortages everywhere.  I mean everywhere.  The truck stops, the restaurants, the hotels, the stores, you name it. Every fast food place we ate at once we reached the south had signs saying they were willing to hire 15-year-olds. (Our first hotel in Texas was so short on housekeeping that even though we didn't arrive until 9pm at night, housekeeping had not yet finished readying our reserved rooms and I went from  room to room with the manager trying to find connecting rooms that were both prepped.  We never found anything; she finally had to put the kids on one end of the floor and Terence and I on the opposite end. Incidentally, that manager was supposed to be on vacation, but they were short-handed and called her in, and she had her kids sitting in the lounge on their tablets entertaining themselves until the end of her shift.)  It was a new experience-- and let me tell you, I think these new policies about "no housekeeping service" in the hotels has nothing to do with covid and everything to do with lack of staff.  It was horrible to pay a significant amount of money to stay in a supposedly upscale beach hotel where we struggled with a lack of towels and bedding, and had to avoid bags of trash in the hallway.  (What else are the guests going to do with the trash, after all?)

Drawbacks aside, we enjoyed the trip very much and formed memories that hopefully the kids will carry for years to come.  The only thing that would have made it better was if M could have come with us, but that kind of comes with this stage of life.  *sigh* Though she comes home for summer break from college in three weeks, so we will see her soon enough!