Weekend road trip

We spent the weekend at my parents' house for my niece's birthday. 

My brother and his family live about 5 minutes from my parents, so when one of his kids has a birthday party, it's time for the whole family to get together. There are 10 of us -- my parents, my brother, his wife and their three kids and Jeff, Biscuit and me.

In a couple of weeks, we'll be on another road trip -- our annual family trip to the mountains. More on that later.

Biscuit gets to be a country boy when we visit his cousins. My family lives in a rural area where boys can be boys and run and play without worrying about cars on the highway or somebody snatching them up. As you stand on my parents' front porch, you overlook a grassy field and the pond. And you can't hear cars on the highway. It's nice and peaceful.

And sometimes, my brother and I get to show Biscuit (and his cousins) some of the things we did as kids.

Like this ...

My brother took his son and Biscuit to see this tiling that goes under the road that leads to my Granny's old house. Here's how you get there. Turn off of a two-lane country road onto a paved road with no markings. Turn off of that road onto a dirt road. Pass my parents' house on the left and keep driving for about 3/4 a mile. The dirt road dead-ends where my Granny used to live. You have to get there on purpose.

My brother and I used to play in this creek all the time. We'd find salamanders and frogs and crawdads and little fish. We would also see the occasional river otter or snake. The creek has long since dried up, but the area around the creekbed looks exactly the same. And I'm glad that Biscuit got to see it. Although, having seen snakes crawl over the top of that tiling, I was happy that I saw this picture after the fact!

We also walked down to the pond to feed the catfish. You scatter the food out into the edge of the water, and those catfish mouths break the surface of the water and start gobbling like Pac-Man in the video game.

Here's a video my brother took of those hungry critters. They're kind of hard to see, but we had half of a gallon bucket of food for them, and I didn't see any of it left floating on the water when we left.


My niece's birthday party went well. As Jeff often says, "Refreshments were served, and a good time was had by all."