The drive was harsh to Book 'Em NC.

Most of you know that I spent this past weekend in Lumberton, North Carolina at the Book 'Em authors' conference and book fair. And boy, what a weekend it was! It was such a crazy weekend that it has taken me this long to get started on my blog posts about it. Yes, posts. . .plural. Hell, I didn't even unpack until this afternoon.

The event wasn't until Saturday morning, but considering how long the drive would be we left Friday morning. I had everything arranged so that we could drop the kids at school and head straight out of town. We were heading on down the highway at 7:15am.

All was well and dandy until just below Atlanta. Rain started slowly, sprinkles, drizzles here and there. Then we exited to the second (of three) Interstate and the heavens opened up with the intent of drowning everyone below. We stopped three times in an attempt to simply take a breath. Once under a bridge as trees whipped around throwing stuff at the vehicles driving by. Traffic had slowed to 30 MPH in whiteout conditions at that point, the radio stations were blaring their emergency broadcasts with warnings/watches of tornadoes in the are, and all you could see was the single yellow line on the left side road.

*This was before it got too rough to see*

Needless to say, we were behind schedule by the time we made it to the Country Inn Suites in Lumberton, NC. I was just glad we'd made it safe & sound considering we'd seen 5 different cars off the road in the process of getting there. Eek!

Luckily, the drive home Sunday was much more pleasant, with sunshine and no rain. Instead of being half an hour behind schedule, we were 1 hour ahead on Sunday. Much better than expected.

Stay tuned tomorrow when I talk about the Author Meet-n-Greet dinner. Later in the week I'll post about becoming a candy pusher. Yeah, it happened before I knew what was going on. :D

Stay tuned!

Camping w/ casualties

Happy Monday! Time to start a brand new week. We spent most of last week in a camper up in Pigeon Forge, TN. The days went by fast, but everyone came home exhausted and suntanned (or burned). So I'd have to say it was a successful mini-vacation. There are a few pictures of the trip in the photo gallery.

We went up Wednesday morning and got there around lunch time. Tim had enough time to set the camper up and I fed the children their lunch before the rain started. It didn't end until well after dark. Day 1, no good. Grumpy kids couped up in a 29 foot camper isn't a pleasant way to spend your time. Trust me on that one.

As for the casualty, well, the storm brought high winds, hail, booming thunder that shook everything, and lots of lightning. There were eight campers in the campground that lost their awnings that night, and we just so happened to be one of them. Tim was extremely upset, but I assured him that everything is repairable. Once he found out we weren't the only ones his mood improved. LOL. Men!

After that first night everything went better. The sun came out; we did a lot of swimming; the kids enjoyed trips to the arcade, coming home with lots of little goodies; and we even tried two restaurants we'd never eaten at. Oh, and of course there was shopping to be done--most of it window shopping, but shopping nonetheless.

All in all, it was a fun trip. We're hoping to take another one toward the end of August, but that's just a consideration right now. We'll see how July goes first. LOL!

I hope you all had a nice weekend and a belated Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there.