OK – Talladega. NASCAR, right? A really bad movie – Talladega Nights- maybe. But here is a whole new definition of racing in Talladega –

And they round the first turn……

Yes, those are toilet racers. It’s amazing how silly 12 oldsters can be when given the opportunity to race toilets!
And they even let the girls play!

I think Gary is having WAY TOO MUCH FUN with this!

And you thought being a SOWER was all about work~! Ha!
(and tomorrow is the miniature golf tournament. Whoee!)

And they really need rain! We drove by the lake today, and all of the boat ramps are pretty useless. They end in the dirt. 🙁 It was pretty sad. But it was great weather for Race Weekend, where a quarter of a million (more or less) folks descend on Talladega to go to the big Ford 500 Race. The trucks raced on Saturday and NASCAR was there on Sunday (Jeff Gordon was the big winner in case you didn’t know). But the information I thought was the most interesting was if you were camping on the grounds (it’s free!), you could have your own porta-potty for a mere $105.00 for the entire weekend! What a deal. Just bring your own padlock (I think the TP was included)! We stayed pretty close to home during the comings and going time of the races, but the entire town was pretty much caught up in race fever. Two of our guys were given tickets for the truck race on Saturday – it was quite an experience from what they said. Here is a shot one of them took – it looks like they had pretty good seats!

I can’t imagine the traffic tonight and tomorrow as everyone heads home. Or the amount of trash that will be left behind.

But we’ve had a good first week on the job. We girls did do one day in the office, but mostly we were in the laundry folding and folding and folding. I don’t think the laundry staff has been quite this caught up in a long time! And since there were plenty of guests here this weekend, I’m thinkin’ we’ll be folding sheets most of the week (or putting them on beds!). We all work together and it makes the time go quickly. The guys have been working on those 7 rooms, plus a couple of them are rebuilding some decks. They are a bunch of hard working of guys!
Some of the other highlights of the week…..
Fast Food Progressive Dinner
You start out at Sonic with a half price burger and a yummy limeade, and you finish off at McDonalds with a $.99 hot fudge sundae. $8.00 for the two of us. Pretty sweet, eh? And we just found out that the Mexican restaurant in town has $5.00 specials on Tuesday night. I think it’s a no-brainer!
Geocaching with friends
We took Lee and Esther out with us on Friday and worked on getting them addicted to geocaching. It was fun to explore the area with them, and they really enjoyed the hunt. As they were hunting in the woods for a cache, I was busy snapping pictures of the beautiful morning glories by the side of the road –

Worship at The Church at Brook Hills
A group of us drove into Birmingham to worship at The Church at Brook Hills this morning. The director of this conference center (Shocco Springs) and his family drive there every week (it’s about 40 miles each way). I’m not a huge fan of Mega Churches (and this is certainly one with about 3500 in attendance every Sunday), but this was an amazing service. Everything about the service – the worship, the baptism and testimony time, the message was all so very Christ centered. It really IS all about Jesus. I brought home a sermon CD – and I’m looking forward to listening again. By the end of the service we could see why the folks here make the drive. I think we’ll be making it again next week!

On deck for this week…..
Well, besides the trip to the Mexican Restaurant, we’re also planning a miniature golf tournament and maybe a hot-dog roast! You never know what just might lie around the corner!
Here are a couple more pictures of our location. I took these on my early morning walks around the lake (all 4 of them!) – that’s our campground up on the hill. (You can almost make out the orange truck)

In this one it’s a little harder to see the “campground” but I love the reflection in the lake.

I’ll keep you posted on how that golf tournament goes!

OK, so where were we? Right, we were on our way to Huntsville Alabama and the US Space and Rocket Museum. That was on Thursday, right? Sometimes all this fun really runs together! 🙂
So, the museum. Well, it was pretty good. The museum itself was quite interesting, and we enjoyed a free tour (and no small school children) during our time there. The Rocket Park (and outside area with many older rockets (the real rockets, not just representations) and a couple of ride-type attractions) was a little….well, seedy is probably the best word I can think of. The rockets needed to be painted, the mulch needed to be weeded and freshened up, stuff like that. There is a lot of construction going on, so maybe the park is next on the list, but we were definitely disappointed with that part of the museum. All in all – we’re glad we went, but probably won’t have to go again any time soon!

We pulled into our October project on Friday Morning. We’ll be serving at Shocco Springs Conference Center -located outside of Talladega (yes, home of the Talladega SuperSpeedway) and my, this is quite a place! It’s one of the largest facilities we’ve worked at, with everything from lovely modern meeting facilities to adventure camps complete with high ropes courses and paintball! We’re parked near the center of things – right across from the lake. Here is a shot of where we are parked, and then taken from almost the same spot, our view of the little lake.

. The guys will be rehabbing (is that a word?) several of the hotel rooms and we ladies will be mostly working in the laundry or in the office. There are a total of 6 Sower couples here, quite a switch from our summer months. Seems like a fun bunch, so we’re looking forward to our time here!
And of course, in an effort to get a feel for the area we had to do some geocaching on Saturday. (Yes, we are quite addicted!). We did a total of 8 (and found all of them!), and four of those were in the same park in nearby Pell City. It was a beautiful day for a good walk (one of the benefits of geocaching), and as you can see by this photo it was a lovely park!

And as you can also see by the dock hanging out of the water in the middle of the photo that they are DESPERATE for some rain down here!
We didn’t actually spend that much time down by the water, but water shots are much more interesting than pictures of containers hidden in the middle of dry creek beds like this –

See what I mean?

A little miscellaneous….
Even though I post my pictures on Flickr (and really like the service) I was given a coupon to make a photo book on Shutterfly. It was fun to do – and here is the finished product if you’d like to take a peek. The real thing should arrive here in a week or so. I can’t wait!

Better get to bed – I’ve got all that towel folding ahead of me tomorrow! 😉

Remember WEC in Ft. Washington, PA (hey, it was just last week!)? Well as many of you know I am very intrigued by old houses/estates and this one totally intrigued me. On our last day there I tracked down a brochure that detailed the property’s rich history plus a CD with some pictures of it in its heyday. And since I found it interesting – I thought you might also! Here goes – (a very condensed version)
Long before it was a beautiful summer estate, it was the location of Gen. George Washington’s encampment before he moved to Valley Forge. That’s when it became known as “Camp Hill”. This historic spot was chosen in 1882 as the site of the country estate of Susan Drexel (daughter of the founder of Drexel University) and her husband John Fell and was called Camp Hill Hall. After she died in 1929 it was sold for a military academy. That failed and the estate remained vacant and was subject to vandals, tramps and souvenir hunters until 1951 when WEC and Christian Literature Crusade put together an offer to purchase the property. They were then able to sell a portion to State of PA for the 309 Expressway which then paid off the mortgage. The story goes on – really miracle after miracle. Today it’s the beautiful headquarters for WEC and several buildings have been added for housing and meetings. Here are a couple of then and now shots.
Then:

Now:

Not the exact same angle – but you can see some of the differences.
Here’s a print from an article about the estate – the water tower and surrounding gardens:

And now….

OK, so that’s all for that history lesson.

But still backing up – we did several geocaches on the way to Chattanooga and then we even did a couple with Chris. She lives very close to the Chattanooga National Cemetery and there were two “virtual” caches there. (A virtual cache is one where you need to gather information and log that in before you can actually log it in as “found”). Anyway this is a beautiful Civil War era cemetery, we were there just at dusk – and I couldn’t resist a couple of shots.

And then there was the Aquarium today – very very nice! There were virtually no crowds, so we were able to take our time and really enjoy the day. Great exhibits – here are a couple of shots, and there are more here. I know, I know. A lot of them are of butterflies, and they aren’t exactly found IN an aquarium, but they did have a cool butterfly garden. And they are much easier to take pictures of than fish and such!

These fish totally posed for us – plus we were able to (more or less) get in the photo too!

And here is one of those butterflies…..

And finally….(still backing up!)
We started on our trip to Chattanooga pre-dawn on Monday. As the sun was rising on our left I grabbed the camera and tried to snap a couple of quick shots. I never know what they are going to look like ( it’s hard to compose a shot when you’re traveling 65 mph down an interstate) – but I was pretty pleased with this one….

Oh just one more “backing-up” – we’re back in the Central Time Zone. Move those clocks back one hour!