We got in Dad's old suburban, which he got on December 31st, 1999. They were getting a different body for the suburban in 2000, and so he wanted the old one and got it. The cool thing about it is that it was purchased on the eve of the "end of the world", 2YK, which never really happened. What's also cool is that it's kind of has the same year I was born that it was born, so it's age is mine too. We're both 12. I was born, August 6th, 1999. When I'm 40, it will be too, if it survives that long. I've always liked it because of that. It has three rows of seats, a grey design, and oldness shrouded all around it. It's not as old as SOME cars I've seen on the trip, like some I've seen in Greenfield Village from 1908, but it has some traits you would NEVER see in a 2011 car, like no GPS, a tiny radio, and just a weird style that's totally unique. When we drove to a post office place in the woods which was really where mail comes in and is put into the vehicles (not where consumers usually get their mail). Nevertheless, we parked on the outside of a small parking lot filled with post office cars, and went into a room with bars and a man on one side and us on the other. The guy scanned the orange note Dad gave him, then gave Dad an envelope, which Dad later told me was internal tax revenue or something or another (took too long to explain). I asked the guy about his Thanksgiving, and we exchanged a little dialogue. He was a tall African-American, and his name Jimmy. He was nice.
The cool thing about Roswell is, that it is a nice city environment that's totally not a city. It's a small, but wonderful town, with good park survives, nice schools and churches, a great community, and many cool businesses. As we drove and got gas, I saw that there were new businesses that had sprung up in 6 months or less, and old ones who'll always be around, like Ray's and antique stores. It was funny to see how stores had just come up out of the blue, and everyone who was in Roswell knew they were here but we didn't because we were gone. It was great to look at old familiar sights again, and to just look around and be contented. We drove through Canton and into my grandparents gated active senior adult community, Soleil, in Laurel Canyon. It's a beautiful place in the mountains, with all kinds of pretty waterfalls, rocky buildings, clubhouses and pools. We got into Soleil after going through the gate, and came to all the little nice houses in a neighborhood. In a big circle full of houses we parked and walked to the blue house, my grandparents'. It's a little house with a garage and deck and I guess a back deck and yard too, but it's not very big. We walked in and were welcomed by my grandparents, Pop and MaPop (real names Bill and Peggy) exchanging happy hellos and great "look how much you've grown's" on my grandparents part. I don't think I've grown at all. Oh well.
We sat down and talked about the trip, how we were going to help them with their tree on Monday, and little stuff of different matters. We talked about stories of the trip, even though they knew like half because they read the blog. Pop even came up with a newspaper from Cherokee, about two adults and their children going around the U.S, homeschooling, and how they went to historical places along the journey and even went to Ben and Jerry's! We've been there! It was so cool to learn about people doing that to, to learn we weren't alone. It was one of those freaky moments. Guess what? They have a blog too, on blogspot, the website this one is on. Creepy. We also went against a wooden column and marked our heights with a pencil. I had done it earlier before the trip, and when I did it here it was a lot higher than before. A lot of people had already told me that I had grown much, but this was proof that it really was true. At one point in the living room we were talking, and Pop said he had something to show Rebecca and me. We went back to his office, which is a little room with couch, desk and leather chair, and closet. He took some old looking books from the closet, dusty, blue and ripped up.we He sat down and flipped through the pages, and we went behind him. He showed us old newspaper clippings, which were yellow and 1930-1940'ish. He showed us his high school football picture, where Pop was brownhaired and handsome. He's tall, cleanshaven, and has laid back hair, but that's not the point. The point is that he showed us those pics, and that the helmet was barely a helmet at all, it was just on the top of his head instead of on his face, where the bars are now modernly there. He showed us an old picture of his grandparents house, and other things. He was looking for a picture when he was a boy scout going to Mammoth Cave, a place we've been too. He looked through several different albums and books, but didn't find it.
We ate brand muffins and another thing I forgot. We then, after a couple of hours, said goodbye to Pop and MaPop. Dad said he was going to Lake Altoona, where all of our family on my dad's side is, and left before Mom and Rebecca is, in the suburban. I remembered that I left my book in the house, and so I went back and got it. We then left. A long time later we came close to Lake Altoona. We came down a hill to an area with a store and bar/grill, with a messed up parking lot and docks to a little bay in the lake. The bar's by the road, and looks like a regular beach shack, saying the same for the store. My uncle, older cousin, and younger cousin, Nathan, were by a white truck which a little boat. We came down and parked, and got out, although my car door was rusty and broken, and closed very uneasily, so it was hard to close. It closed eventually though. "Hi!," I said to Uncle Dean, Cousin Blade (who's in his 30's and is the Dad of my second cousin, Nathan) and Cousin Nathan. We did welcoming words with each other, talking and saying stuff like," The trip was fun" and "how are you". We talked a little, and I asked Nathan some questions. He asked if we wanted to go fishing on the dock; I said I was fine with it. We got some fishing polls and a stryaphome box full of minos. We went down to a long wooden dock by the restaurant. I carried two poles and the minos box. You don't think about it, but 20 minos in a box after a long downhill walk hurts your hand. Your not tired from it, but it you put the rope your carrying it from and put your arm through, it hurts after a while. We finally got to the end of the dock, and sat every thing down. By the way, let me now describe Nathan. He is pretty tall, but a little shorter than me, thin, and has black hair. He is 11 or 12. Nathan is a nice guy.
He showed me how to hold the pole, and then how to reel it out with a special kind of way not usual on most fishing polls. It had a thing where you press down and fling it out. Nathan had like three lines going, piercing the fish on the hooks and placing them far into the water. He said when we were on the boat they didn't catch anything, so he doubted if they would be lucky now. He said I was to just keep flinging the poll out, and then reel it in right away, and repeat the process until I caught a fish by the hook, without bait. So I was really trying to hook a fish without bait and just try to be lucky. Now, I may not know much about fishing, but you'd have to be a fool to think that you would catch something. I kept telling Nathan this, but he was unpushable. We talked of the trip, my favorite places, and him being in school and how that was going. I enjoyed telling him about the ducks, and other things. The really cool thing was if I saw a duck going by, I would immediately tell him about the Peabody Ducks. Or, if I saw a huge rocky island with trees on it and several layers of different colored rocks, I would mention Pictured Rocks. And, don't get me wrong, it wasn't to brag. It was out of just doing it and thinking about it. I made a revelation, that when I'm back for good, I'll still be telling stories. I might be thought a snob or bragger, people might always hope to here the stories and be really interested, or they might just get bored of me telling them all that and not get them a chance to talk. But here I pledge right now, I will be modest. But, I do think that it's kind of cool to now say about my travels, and I now (even though we're not finished) have a bigger perspective of my country. Also, the trip won't ever vanish completely. It'll still come up on me even in my adult life. And I'm okay with that.
I looked at the minos for a while, then looked at the lines laid down on the dock, that weren't held but still in the water.We also tried to scoop up as many minos as we could in a little net, and the one of the two of us who does more wins. The minos didn't exactly like the game though. At one point Nathan had a bite way away(because he threw his line out far) and so he jumped off the dock at a point where it was in muddy land and jumped to the other one, to be closer to his prey. Well, it bit the fish off and got away. It also messed up his line somehow, so that it couldn't work. He said he liked that pole. We went back up and got the poles in the boat, and before that we played around and laughed and made jokes. We washed our hands in a nice little store run by a student with a red laptop and red phone. He was tall, dark, and very nice, after we bought crackers and two bottles of water. He asked us how our Thanksgivings were, and we said they were great and how was his. He said his was good. We then went back outside, and were told to dump the fish out into the lake, because the minos had been used for like 3 days already and needed to go, and that they weren't gonna fish anymore so had no need of them. So we took up one minos at a time, told a little bit about them, and gave them a name, and then put them in the water. Sierra, Paul, Jackson, Richard, they all had different personalities. Some jocks, some nerds, some in between. It was fun. They were the graduating class of Bourne Fishing School. At one point Nathan got a fish(Flippy the first) and threw it backward. I was okay with him doing it because he's usually a good thrower, but sadly, it landed on another part of that vertical long dock. He bounced off and landed into the water, and we were glad it was okay until it popped back to the surface again, on it's side. R.I.P. Flippy. Poor Fish.
"Come on!" Blade said. We dumped the remainder of the fish in(four of them) without any ceromony and ran up. I will now describe Dean and Blade, sorry I did not do it earlier. Uncle Dean is tall, has whiskers, and has strait military style hair, but not too much, I never really know, he little takes off his brown fedora. It looks like it's Indiana Jones's hat.He's stern and hard to make a joke with, but he's generally a wonderful man. Blade is large(not that large) and has black hair, the same kind as Nathan. By and by we said goodbye to them, that we were going to the Marina, a large flat blue metal building with boats and a big parking lot, going downhill to the lake. Dean owns it. He also owns a bait shop, and candy shop that got hurt in a flood. My cousin Danielle and her husband Blue(really his name, not joking) work there, in the marina. We saw all the nice boats on the outside, and said hello to Blue. He's a robust man with brown hair laid back kind of. He's hardworking, nice, and jovial. Blue said that work was slow today, and that he wanted to do SOMETHING productive instead of twiddling his thumbs. He was cleaning out his car. We went in the building, and it was the same as before, large, desks in the front in a horizontal line, boats all around inside of there, and restrooms and private offices in the back. Blue showed us some boats outside, saying that most were sold and a few too expensive to buy, really. That was a nice surfing red boat with slick features called a Centurion. Sea Arks and other things were bought though. It was fun to talk about boats. Like most of the people we would see, he asked if we were going back out later. Yes, we said.
We left, and went in the forest to a different marina, the locked one where our boat is. It's down a long hill in DOCK C, which you can only get into by typing into a punched numbers, or, if you prefer, jumping in the lake and swimming around. Uphill is a parking lot and other buildings. We prefered to go the dry way, and punched in the card and walked under the covered drafty dock, with all the boats. Our blue pontoon was okay, although it was dusty and one part of a tall compartments cushioned door was up. We quickly fixed that. It was really dirty, seriously, you would've thought it was 100 years old, or more. We left there and went into Victoria, where our small one floor cabin is. It was oringally my grandpas, but when he died it became Uncle Deans, Aunt Denise's, and Dad's. They share it. It has a small porch surrounded by netlike material, and a cool little yard with a tree, a rock path, a fence around it, and cool garden trinkets. Right when you walk inside is a living room with couches, and on the left a good bedroom, and then a kitchen and table and pantry and fridge, not forgetting also the other bedroom and back room with two black couch/beds. Then there's a back porch, reachable by slideable doors. I love the cabin. I have a lot of memories there. It was pretty much in good shape, although there were cobwebs and cockroaches. Our OWN house has the former. We said goodbye to the cabin and drove to Uncle Dean's where I saw Dean again and Aunt Barbara, a black haired nice women with bare feet usually. I don't know how she manages wood, stone, and grass without any foot wear. It's crazy.
We hugged and talked, espiaclly about the Christmas Party happening at Dean's. We then drove off. Even though Dad said we would see them at the party, I still wanted to see Aunt Denise NOW. We drove to there little house with yard and deck, and parked. I said hello to Denise, hugging. She's a black haired lady with a large appearance. We talked about the trip and about their new Shitzhu dog, and about different things. I saw Daniel, Denise's son, my cousin, a dark haired tan guy who I love talking about superheroes and movies with. We talked about Thor and Capt. America, and also the son of a really famous actor, I think. We also saw Danielle, and said hi. She's also blackhaired but younger. We talked, about how much I had grown. I'm getting tired of hearing that. I really am. Oh well. We said goodbye and that we would see them again and took Danielle to the marina, where we dropped her off and said goodbye. We drove away, back toward Roswell. I had a wonderful time with the Bourne's and Pop and MaPop. I thought I was done for the day, and I was really tired, but, this was just the beginning.
TO BE CONTINUED....
(END OF PART ONE. See First Full Day in Roswell Part Two for rest of story.)
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