Our Trip to Wal-Mart Country, Part One

Over Thanksgiving break (meaning that we both had time off of work,) Juston and Frankie and I packed up the Mazda and took our first road trip in a year and a half. We drove about 1,400 miles over five days and visited six states. We had an excellent time visiting with family members (and seeing three cooling towers - I was mesmerized as I don't think I've really ever seen one before!) Thanks to Jacob and Deon for being such great hosts and also thanks to the good people of the oil cartels who have somehow managed to lower gasoline prices to $1.55 a gallon.

Bentonville, Arkansas - the home of Wal-Mart.


Thrilled.


Frankie and Brightyn, who is either his second cousin once removed or his third cousin (he's Juston's cousin's kid.) Does anyone actually know how all of that works?


While I don't have any pictures of the actual feast, Thanksgiving dinner was followed by pie for the adults and birthday cupcakes for the kids since the holiday doubled as Brightyn's birthday!


On Black Friday, we ate burgers. Jacob ate *this* burger, which made Frankie actually exclaim 'ewwwwww' when he saw it. I concur, son.



After the burgers, we went to feed the geese before naptime. The geese ate lots of swindled crackers from the burger joint, as well as stale goldfish and freeze-dried bananas.



Juston had the most fun. He wrangled geese, while I only managed to get bitten, if you can get bitten by something that has no teeth.




Frankie really liked Jacob and Deon's birds, but only when they were in their cages. Once we pulled this one out, he wanted nothing to do with it and cried the whole time; that's not a smile on his face, but rather fear that he wears. Ya'd think that being surrounded by geese would be worse than a piddly domesticated bird. (Notice my mad hand-modeling skills.)


You will also please notice how I called this 'part one.' Oh yes, there will be more photographs. I've got to delay the gratification by stretching this out over multiple posts.