24 hours in our car

Our First Sonic
Originally uploaded by christyc730

We drove to Columbia, SC to see my brother-in-law get his Ph.D. It's a 9 to 10 hour car trip that we managed to do in 12 hours. Each way. So in the past week, we've spent over 24 hours in our van (at least that, since we also drove all around sight-seeing). While there, I saw my first actual Sonic. We see their ads on tv around here, but we don't have one (probably there is one someplace, but I don't know where it is). I HAD to try it. It was a little disappointing. Not worth driving twelve hours to get to.

Mainly our trip consisted of a culinary tour of Columbia. I was a little frustrated. I didn't drive half a day just to sit in a hotel room until the next meal. I wanted to go out and do things. But we were there with a large group (pretty much Tom's entire family went down) and it was difficult, if not impossible, to mobilize everyone. It wasn't until it was just us five left that we did anything interesting. We crammed several days worth of local fun into one day. We went to the Riverbanks Zoo and Botanical Gardens in the morning and the (air-conditioned) SC State Museum in the afternoon. Because - good god it was hot. Way too hot to be outside in the mid-day. The coolest temperature we saw was 91. At night. Mostly it was 100 or above during the day. The hotel pool wasn't even refreshing. It was so warm it was like swimming in sweat.