Atlanta & Allatoona

Dr. King

When we were in the playground of the King Center, a group of mostly black middle school kids loudly joined us, as middle school kids do. Ben, sitting on a bench eating a string cheese, muttered to himself, “Wow, there are a lot of Americans here.” If you don’t know, he’s growing up in Montana. He’s probably never been the minority skin tone in any group ever before. He processed it well and with a little coaching went out to discover the age of the other young child in the playground - probably a 1st grader like himself.

Anyway, visiting the King Center was an important activity for our family. I was quite moved by it. We sat in Dr. King’s church and listened to his preaching, visited his boyhood home, and toured a museum to his life. He had six principles of nonviolent action that I will need to meditate on for a while. If I lived more according to those principles, my life would be better.

Legoland

Ben had been talking about this for months. He had planned the rides. I didn’t even know there were guides to Legoland. You know how Tigger bounces in Winnie-the-Poo? You need to imagine a blue-eyed, blond, skinny-bean-of-a-six-year-old bouncing like Tigger.

After I recovered from the $ticker $hock, it was a pretty fun place. We shot Lego monsters on a digital ride, watched a 4D movie and got soaked, and played away the afternoon.

Camping

This was our favorite campsite so far.We were right across from the boat dock and at first it seemed like a bummer. But it really turned out to be that someone cleared out a beautiful view of the lake and the sunrise just for us. The bugs stayed away and even though the weather was hot, we stayed relatively cool.