Mom’s Southern Tour.

I’m lucky enough to make my own schedule (yay!) and Geoff is lucky enough to work from the road or at home. So we didn’t schedule any shoots or weddings for the month of March, and instead Geoff, my sister Laura, and myself took my mom on a two week road trip for her retirement! I’ll now field the following frequently asked questions:

#1 – But where was your dad?! Yes, this is the number one frequently asked question, and I believe our dad is flattered by how many of you are wondering about his whereabouts. Our dad was working because he’s not yet retired himself, and is saving his vacation days for the prized annual family beach trip.

#2 – Where did you go? We visited Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, Natchez, and Asheville. We drove over 3,000 miles in my 2008 Mazda3 and listened to approximately 3,000 miles worth of Counting Crows. It only rained once. We saw alligators, cats, many cemeteries, ghost tours, the Mardi Gras Indians, and a surprising amount of hoop skirts.

#3 – Natchez? Natchez is a little town in Mississippi that has been calling to my mother via a southern cocktails book I got for her birthday several years ago and we’ve all just come to accept it and decided to take her there. She particularly wanted to tour a bunch of old houses, so that’s exactly what we did.

#4 – Did you have fun? We did indeed have all of the fun! We stayed in a bunch of Air BnBs and nobody was murdered. We drove all over the south but managed not to have any roadkill accidents, car accidents, or tickets of any kind! It was a bit cold, but otherwise everything went extremely well and we are all alive to tell the tale. Our mom got to see all sorts of great things that we love about living down here, and we got to eat a bunch of salted caramel donuts from HiVolt again. We took a ton more pictures of various other activities we did, but we used our cell phones for a lot of it (I usually don’t feel like lugging the big boy camera around if I don’t have to or else I feel an obsessive need to document because normally I’m paid to do that, so then I have a harder time living in the present moment… so sometimes cell phone pictures are a great relief for me). :)

#5 – Best part? We loved touring the Mercer Williams house in Savannah (house from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) where there are several resident cats. If you look closely underneath the roped off antique furniture, you can spot cat toys that have been batted under there and not yet retrieved.

#6 – Second best part? Seeing John Goodman walking his golden retriever.

#7 – Worst part? Slumped across a table in my pajamas holding back hungry tears while eating instant grits and a gluten-free Girl Scout cookie at 12:30am for “dinner” when Domino’s failed to deliver what should’ve been an 11:30pm pizza after an all-day drive to New Orleans from Savannah.

#8 – Second worst part? Driving through Atlanta’s i-85. Normally Geoff does this because he’s braver than I am, and I close my eyes and pretend it’s not happening. But Geoff had some work to do, so he sat on his laptop and I white-knuckled through it in fear.

#9 – Best food? Eating at the Gumbo Shop in New Orleans!

#10 – MVP? Our mom, of course! We love you and are so happy we got to take this trip with you!

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