Never will learn to get to bed early when we have to get up at eight the next morning. :-)

By nine we had money, a small breakfast from Burger King, and were on the road to Stone Mountain. It was cloudy when we started out, but the sun had emerged by the time we got to the park and joined the queue getting into the gate. We were there just in time to get a nice close parking space, only three rows behind the vendors' trucks.

Thankfully there was a breeze and we were in the shade of the trees on the trails that the booths were on, or it might have gone worse. There were crowds already; usually we have about a half hour before the press of people starts to get thick. We flitted from booth to booth of whatever interested us: paintings, odd sculpture, carved wood, lawn decorations, and the numerous food samples (barbecue sauce, dips, soups, prepared dinners, maple syrup—the man let us sample some B- syrup; oh my! what an aftertaste, almost like molasses—candy, etc.). We listened to the various musicians promoting their wares, dodged small children and strollers, watched exhibitions. It took us three hours to wend our way through all the different booths, skipping the the displays of cutesy kids' clothing (Grandma places!) and mostly skipping the jewelry booths.

I did, on the other hand, buy a piece of clothing. You needn't faint! It's a piece of netting that fits over your head like a poncho, decorated with silver holographic spider webs. I figured I never have anything to wear for Hallowe'en if it's warm; this can go over my short-sleeved purple shirt and look kind of neat. I can buy a rubber spider at one of the dollar stores or a Hallowe'en store if I want to jazz it up a little. They had a spider pin, but...

We also stocked up on "Smack Yo Mama" barbecue sauce for the year, bought one of the great bread knives (we'd intended to last year, but the vendor wasn't there), got a couple of firestarters for emergencies, bought the first of our two yearly fudge treats, got a key lime dip mix, chocolate pie kit, and some cocoa, found the lady with the delicious mint jelly with the bits of mint leaf in it and bought a jar, and also a half-dozen apple cider doughnuts.

I also bought another little miniature set-up from Country Pickin's, another fall arrangement. Not sure where to put it. I wanted something for the craft room, but most of the craft theme is sewing.

We emerged from the trail about one o'clock. The sun was...intense. We each had an ear of grilled corn, standing in the shade of a picnic pavilion to eat most of it, then went on. Jen was hoping to get a shot of Stone Mountain, but by the time we left, traffic was bumper-to-bumper and there was nowhere to park. So we just turned around and left.

We thought about many options for lunch, including Cracker Barrel (but the line was out the door there). We ended up at Folks, where we had a nice leisurely meal and discussed Jen's drive down to Florida on Monday.

Since even when you have houseguests, you must do the shopping, we ended up at Kroger to buy gasoline and the needed groceries for the week. Then we could get back to the house and relax. Jen caught up on her correspondence and I rifled through the floppy disks I'd never copied to hard disk and turned up the photos from the 2000 Remember WENN get-together, which was a mad conglomeration of shots from the Thurber House, the Columbus history museum, and our visit to the Air Force Museum in Dayton.

Since we never did have a free morning for a homemade breakfast, James made buckwheat pancakes and bacon for supper instead. This was a package of bacon we had left over from a food pack—wow, am I glad we never got any more of that. James kept frying and draining and rinsing, and we got this tiny portion of bacon from a pound of the stuff, and over half a cup of bacon grease! Yuk.

Spent the evening "filling in" From the Earth to the Moon episodes. We'll get to show Jen everything but the Apollo 13 episode, which is actually about the reporters anyway.

Labels: events, food, shopping

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 7:50:00 PM

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