Thanksgiving Holiday Day 0

In which Southern Man will depart from work at five-ish and, rather than drive an hour in the wrong direction just to sleep and wake up and come back this way will begin a long, meandering journey to East Texas to join the rest of the clan for Thanksgiving Day.

The journey began with a nice relaxing steak dinner - a rare treat for Southern Man - and then a couple of movies to while away several hours. Ender's Game was a decent, if superficial, pass at the book - heavy on battle scenes, light on the subtleties of Bugger-Human relations and Wiggins-family drama. Hardly hardly any of the training sequences made the final cut. If you read and enjoyed the book, the film at least makes sense and even throws a few bones our way (not to mention forshadowing Speaker For The Dead); if you have never read the book it's a standard sci-fi B movie. Gravity was just plain awful (apparently Newton's Laws are applied only to the extent that the plot requires) and its generally favorable reviews are an indication of just how far the science-literacy bar has fallen.

Then it was midnight and time to hit the road. Southern Man spent a couple of hours geocaching (most of that time spent poking around an old caboose with flashlight in hand and not finding the cache allegedly hidden there)...

The caboose in daylight. Several freight trains came by on the tracks in the background while Southern Man searched for the elusive cache. Photo stolen from Flickr.

...and then got on the turnpike to head south...