Deep South, part un

This is for you, Auntie Jan!
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I have a wee little time to blog this morning, due to Sarah being a little more Dee Dee-ish in the mornings than me.

Some fun things that have happened so far:

4.  Someone trying to convince me that grits really are good
Check!
This was quite casually done.  Sarah mentioned maybe we could go out for breakfast the next morning - and they she snuck in, "so you can try some grits".  HAH!  I'm on to you!  Nope! 

Fun Eats so far:
Mexican:  Yum!  You know how it is, hard to get good Mexican food in Canada.  So Friday night we headed out - yum yum yum!

10.  Barbeque.  Wait, no, its Barbecue.
Check!
We went to Dreamland Barbecue for lunch yesterday - I had a chopped pork sandwich.  It was friggin' awesome.  The sauce was just how I liked it - tangy, not too sweet.  We are bringing a big jug home with us - maybe I'll tune my own pulled-pork sauce to it?  It's pretty close already, mine is just maybe a bit too sweet.  The most hilarous thing - when we first came to the restaurant, while we were still deciding what to order, the waitress (who was SUPER nice and sweet, as expected in the South!) said she'd give us a few minutes and just come back with some bread.  She came back with a plate of white bread and a side of barbecue sauce!  HAHAHA.  Like, I'm talking a stack of Wonderbread here.  Unheard of!  Shown here is the big wood fire ovens they slow roast the meat in.  Mmmm.

For dinner - why, a good ol' low country boil!  We went to Po' Boy Factory and we got the last platter of crawfish boil for the season!  It is this huge platter with three pounds of spicy crawfish, served with three little boiled potatoes, half a cob of corn, and two inches of sausage.  All four of us attacked it - eating crawfish is a lot of work!  They are like wee little lobsters, but they are so little, you only really eat the meat in the tail, which you have to put quite a lot of work into before it can be removed.  We also ordered crab legs and some shrimp - man, we were frantically tearing into this fish for over an hour before we each finally leaned back and mumbled something about having to wash our hands so we could stop.

All that fish (it was essentially a meal of only protein) lit a fire in my belly, so up the mountain we went.  We drove up to near the top, and then Sar and I power-walked (I have honestly never walked so fast - it was like I was on a movator) to the top in the gloaming.  We got to the top, which was very pretty, a sort of hazy view over the nearby hills, very pretty (shown below, but it was really much darker than the picture lets on).  The walk down was more hilarious.

So my night vision isn't so good. (That's Mrs. So to you!)  By the time we had to begin our trek back down the (paved) path, it was pretty close to dark out.  Well, I essentially couldn't see.  It was like walking in gravy.  So I had a leader (as for a blind person).  It was Sarah's turn, and we were walking along (slow but steady) and chatting away, then all of a sudden - I stopped (mid-sentence), and very gingerly put out my right foot in front of me like there was going to be a large step or something.  As I was doing it, I could see white disembodied foot reaching out in front of me, and we both doubled over in laughter.  It was the equivalent of walking on flat carpet and suddenly stopping to take a tentative step forward for no apparent reason.  Maybe you had to be there, but I had tears streaming down my face (of laughter).  It was like the time Sarah tipped us in the canoe at Uncle Lorne's!  hahah - good cousinly fun.

6. Drinking unsweetened iced tea
Check!  Both at the barbecue place and the Po' Boy place.  Sooo good.  I must have had a litre + of iced tea yesterday!  (Sarah and Adrian order half sweet, which means she mixes the unsweetened jug with the sweetened jug).

17.  Riding in a Volvo
Check!
Obvi!

Sarah's house and neighbourhood is super sweet and quite Southern!  Lovely!  And of course a huge yard.   We watched both soccer games yesterday, which was quite excellent.  I think those Germans are going to go all the way.

Today we're off to see the Rocket Ships!  Oh, and tonight, we're going to "cook out" (this is pronounced with the emphasis on 'out', and as two distinct words).  This is a term I hadn't heard before, I had to ask Christian to repeat himself.  It's what I would normally call, "having a barbeque", but of course the b-word is reserved here to mean tangy sauce on slow cooked meat.

Hah!