Family Reunion

Well here I am in lovely downtown Statesville. This place could be any town America. Kind of like a Norman Rockwell feeling to the place and although I actually haven't walked around the downtown yet, just driving through it had a feel somewhat reminiscent of lovely downtown Noho. Unfortunately, the only internet cafe in town apparently shut down a couple of months ago so I'm limited to the local library access at the moment. I'm actually surprised that the kid-filter here let me into the blog. I would thought all those "bad" words on my blog would have tripped the alarm system.

Meanwhile, it is so great to be hanging with Dad and Helen (who I consider to be my "real" mom). It turned out to be an impromptu family reunion. I haven't seen them in six years. My sister and her husband showed up and step sister Linda lives next door so she was there. Then as luck would have it, Aunt Bertha and Uncle Buddy were coming through town on their way to Florida to survey their apparently ruined vacation home and stopped in unexpectedly as well with their daughter Barbara who is also in my age range.

Linda is a fabulous cook and we had a dinner that could not be beat. With so many of us, the "sisters" (we're all in the same age range) ate on the front porch and traded stories about our horrible luck with men. Of course my sister Anne has been married to Harry for decades and he wandered out briefly to see why we were laughing so hard. He disappeared as soon as he heard the word sex bandied carelessly about.

The ride out was not that pleasant, the highway was crowded right up until I was about 40 miles out but the scenery was beautiful from there. You know you're in hillbilly country though when you start seeing the confederate flags flying right under the stars and stripes on the flagpoles. It's also surprisingly cold here. It gets down to the high 40s at night and the days haven't been mush over 70 degrees in the heat of the day.

My hotel room is hysterical. I took the cheapest room I could find, (with the tourist coupon) at the allegedly remodeled Motel 6. It's quiet and it actually has a great view. It looks over an empty field full of wildflowers and in the morning you can hear the birds even though I'm quite close to the highway. I had a choice of three hotels within the block but chose this one because you can open the windows. Ironically with the cold nights I've also had to turn on the heat which fortunately works very well.

The hotel itself is quite run down, stains on the interior corridor carpeting and my bathroom has great water pressure in the shower but the corner of the toilet tank lid is broken off and the skin drain stopper is missing the little handle so it's just a metal rod sticking up from the sink. The bed is comfortable enough however and it's an easy three minute drive from Dad's so it's been something of tradeoff but I'm happy enough and what can you expect for $30 a night anyway?

So blogging in any event is likely to be lighter than I expected although I will try to get in for an update once a day, I hate to waste a second of time I could be spending with Dad. So, if I disappear, expect to see me back on track by Wednesday night.

UPDATE: Well I can't preview the post, (I assume becasue of the filter) so I'm hoping this actually publishes. I'll be bummed if I just wasted the time writing all this down for nothing. Keeping my fingers crossed...