Lessons Learned On a Trip To Georgia

The family recently took the long President's Day weekend to travel 13 hours (16 hours with all of our stops!) to Georgia. We stayed in the Atlanta Metro area in a town called Alpharetta. That town has the North Point Community Church where our Sunday School curriculum comes from. Jaci and I had visited during the summer of 2008, but we wanted to bring the kids down to see it. We also took the kids to a mummy exhibit at Emory University and the Atlanta Aquarium featuring a Titanic exhibit. We had so much fun and were so blessed by our time at North Point. We truly love the area where the church is located and would love to live there some day!

During the very lengthy trips to and from the kids were absolute angels. This is shocking because Jackson usually freaks out and screams endlessly on a simple trip to the store. Yet for the entire trip, God blessed us with good behavior on the kid front.

So, here are some things we learned on our trip:

1. Having a 2 monitor portable DVD player in the backseat for the kids is an amazing thing. Everyone should have one.

2. Those southerners like their speed! The speed limit on many roads in the south was 70 MPH. That was fun and sped up the trip!

3. Sonic is a cool fast food place that should come up north.

4. Cracker Barrels are on every corner south of Delaware.

5. You apparently take a route through Tennessee to come home after leaving western North Carolina.

6. There is actually a town called "Bat Cave" in North Carolina. No word on whether Bruce Wayne lives there or not. Alfred could not be reached for comment.

7. Houses are dirt cheap in Georgia. For the price of a modest double-wide in NJ you could own a southern mansion.

8. Jaci's Uncle Don likes to go for mountain drives. We stayed with him in North Carolina on Sunday night on our way home. He took Jaci for a drive of the scenery and they weren't seen again for hours.

9. Noah knows everything there is to know about mummies and Egypt. He rattled off names of Egyptian gods, customs, and artifacts.

10. Atlanta is much cleaner than Philly. Philly looks like a third world poverty-stricken country compared to the beauty and cleanliness of Atlanta.

11. GPS is a wonderful thing. Except sometimes it gets confused and tells you to do U-turns and then when you complete that U-turn it tells you to do it again.

12. It is possible to sometimes order healthy food when you go out.

13. It is also possible to workout while you are away.

14. God is awesome and has a big plan and adventure for all of us.

15. The south sure loves their confederate history. Virtually every road is named after a Civil War general.

Anyway, we had a great time and look forward to the next time we can visit our adopted home state of Georgia!