Bucket List continued

See my latest Ask Your Fantasy Football Expert blog post at my other blog home, Zach on Sports.

I feel a Bucket List Tune coming on..."Where did you go oh Bucket List, we had such high hopes for you and you just left, weft weft weft..."

What happened to the June Bucket List? Well, one of the smartest decisions we made regarding the Bucket List was to make it a summer Bucket List, not just for one month. It's not dead yet.

Over the past weekend we did two BL-worthy events. The first lasted an entire weekend and the other was over in about an hour. We visited Lake Sinclair in East Georgia and saw Flannery O'Connor's house.

The lake trip was our substitute for an annual beach trip we usually take with a couple I'll call the Crunks. The trip was canceled since we're still in the new home phase of our finances and Mr. Crunk is a teacher who thought he was going to lose his job. He did not. Mrs. Crunk's family owns a lake house so we got it for a weekend. It was my first four-day weekend of the year that didn't involve me laying on the couch, sick.

The drive to the house was the adventure. It was 130 miles, give or take, that took us nearly 2.5 hours. The country roads at the end were what slowed us down, including one shortcut the wife suggested that took us down an unpaved dirt road. I white-knuckled it for a few miles while she said things like "cute ponies". We were paranoid that we'd miss our last opportunity to order fried chicken out of a gas station, so we stopped about 30 miles short of our destination to load up.
When you finally make it to the lake, proof that you're in a small town is that instead of there being street signs, there's a list of the names of the families that live on that street.

It was the middle of the afternoon before I finally made it down the steep hill to the dock. The spot is pristine. If you want to leave the city, come here. You hear nothing but nature and float. The dock was at the corner of a cove so there was little traffic.

What on earth did we do for those three days? We sat under my friend's Chicago Bears tent. We did not secure the tent on the first evening and it ended up in the lake. We got it out but the supports were bent so we duct-taped it and hoped that it wouldn't fall apart. It survived, although another storm on the final evening put the contraption in the drink for good. I rediscovered that swimming is very hard. We went to dinner with Mrs. Funk's father and arrived in a boat. There's something about docking a boat and going to eat in a restaurant. For the most part, I sat in a chair and read books or listened to podcasts. In the evenings we grilled out and continued reading books.

On the way home, Mrs. Blogger aka the wifey wanted to stop at nearby Milledgeville to see Flannery O'Connor's farm. I have not read a word of O'Connor's work, although I put two of her works on hold at the library. Hey, she's dead. She doesn't need the money. O'Connor had Lupus so she had to live on the first floor while she wrote. It's a historical site but really it's a run-down old farm. There are dozens like it in the area, I'm sure. Her bedroom was roped off, but the guide quickly told us that her actual typewriter had been donated to a local college and what we saw was a replica at best.

The selling point of the trip were the peacocks. I know, peacocks? We visited the Ernest Hemingway house in Key West years ago and what I remember were the six-toed cats that were everywhere. We went out back and saw the peacocks. Birds are the opposite of humans, in that the males are generally dressed up and preening while the females are somewhat plain. The male was a work of art, all blue breast with the furled tail twice as long as the rest of the body. He strutted for us a bit but did not unfurl the tail. The peahens for the most part sat. They were brown with some green. Technically they're all peafowls, but peacock is the more impressive term.
We stopped at a local BBQ joint and I had one of my favorite treats, a Dr Pepper in a bottle. I almost always drink Diet now but the stuff in a bottle is the best. The sauce was quite full of vinegar and had the right amount of bite.

We made it home and the weekend was over. The highlight was when we took the paddleboat out on the second night, wheeled out to the edge of the cove, and watched the end of the sunset. I'm recharged, or better be since I'm going to work shortly in either case.