Vacation: Days 1 and 2

Well, the Rowes are down in Tennessee for a family vacation, and we have had a day and a half of fun.  Getting here was a bit more stressful than we had hoped for, however!  To begin with, one of our carry-ons got flagged for a more extensive search at security.  I had been on guard because I had a container of non-dairy creamer in my purse.  I thought there was a chance a cylinder of white powder might be deemed suspicious, but once it went through the X-ray machine and down towards the collection area, I breathed a sigh of relief.  Immediately afterwards, Julia's backpack went through and was sent to the suspicious side of the moving belt.  We had to wait for all other suspicious bags that were in line before Julia's to be checked, so it was awhile before the guard began rifling through hers.

Here is what the offending item was:

Julia's collection of people, sold by ethnicity.  She has the Native American family, Caucasian family, Hispanic family, and so forth.

The guard turned the Ziploc bag of people over and over with a look of bafflement on his face.

GUARD: Where did you get these??
ME: Uh, Lakeshore Learning?
GUARD: (shrugging) Okay.  Have fun with them. (Putting them back in Julia's backpack and handing the backpack to us.)

The next snag in our travel was the fact that our first flight took off over a half hour behind schedule.  We wound up landing in Atlanta with 15-20 minutes to catch our connecting flight to Knoxville, and we needed to get to a gate three terminals away.  We took the train across the three terminals, then discovered our gate was one of the furthest ones from the train stop.

ME: We have to run!
ALL OF US: (running like idiots in flip-flops and backpacks through the airport.)

We arrived at the gate frantic and panting, only to discover our flight hadn't even started boarding.  Oh.  Hi everyone.  We weren't just sprinting like maniacs for no reason.

So all worked out and we spent the afternoon at the water park at our hotel:

In the evening, due to the fact that nothing but a curtain separates the living area from the sleeping area, Ethan and I watched a TV show on his computer with one earphone each:

Today we went to the zoo in Knoxville, and we had so much fun that we spent almost the entire day there!  Here are some of the highlights:

We we're so pooped after a full day of walking, exploring, and sunshine that we came back to the hotel so we could all lie down in bed for an hour before heading out to dinner!  We will see what adventures tomorrow has in store!