CLAIRE!!! (The end of days.)

After our beginning of days with Claire, we carried on for some more delightful fun!

We found ourselves at Rocky Springs - the "ghost town" off of the Natchez trace. It really just a little thing with some old safes and a church that is well in tact. We were walking around the ghost town, and be still my heart, we saw a GINORMOUS spider...and I almost walked straight into it! It had its web strung across the path! Whew. My heart starts pounding now just thinking about it. There is also Little Sandy Creek near this place so we walked through it. Alyssa was very brave and sat all the way in the water and played quite happily. We saw micro frogs and a crawdad thing and more mosquitoes. It was a fun day.

Another adventure took us all the way to Natchez. We went to Mammy's Cupboard, the restaurant that is indeed shaped like Mammy. We all delighted in the blueberry lemonade!

I know it is sideways, but I CANNOT figure out how to rotate pictures with Linux. Let's start a campaign to get me a new computer that actually functions normally. Bear with me...there will be more.

After lunch we went to Longwood, a plantation home built by a man named McNutt. It was awesome! The house is finished from the outside - the entire structure is standing up to the very top spire thing on the big round balloony lookin' thing. On the inside, however, only the basement was finished - all 10,000 sq feet of it. The house was supposed to be 30,000 sq feet, but it was not finished due to the war and the devastation that brought to the south.

We enjoyed the tour and the experience.

On the way home from Natchez we stopped by the Windsor Ruins, another plantation owner's home that burned to the ground except for the huge pillars that surrounded the outside of the house.

Then it was Friday and that meant Claire had to go home. Bummer. Makes me sad just thinking about it. We played and had fun and went to Newk's for lunch where Claire's salad bowl was as big as her head and then off to the airport.

We had such a fun week with Claire. She was phenomenally loving and patient with Alyssa. She let Alyssa pick out her earrings multiple times a day and on Friday night Alyssa prayed "Thank you we could pick out earrings." They played together in her room each morning. We played hide and see and huckle buckle bean stalk. We talked and laughed and played games each night. We made pizza and painted our nails. It was so wonderful!

This week she leaves on her mission. Tears will be shed and we will all miss her physical (video chat) presence and her phone calls, but I rest assured that her emails will be jovial. Her writing skills are quite superb. She will be a wonderful missionary and I am so proud of her for deciding to serve the Lord for the next 18 months. Orlando is in for a treat! And don't blame me if I accidentally drive 10 hours and 53 minutes east in current traffic to catch a glimpse of our sweet Claire.

And as a post note, to prevent super-sadness, Alyssa and I went to the children's museum after the airport. They have a "how it's made" exhibit right now, so Alyssa made a trolley from Mr. Rogers! We also got to make a spoon from a cool machine and do some wax molding.