The first place we looked was Jockey’s Ridge State Park, home to one hang gliding school and one giant sand dune. The signs all said it was easy to get lost there, so I figured the colonists could easily be wandering around in the sand.

It was kind of like that time we went to White Sands. You know, except not HORRIBLE. JOSH. Sorry, I’m still maybe not over the whole losing my keys incident.

My first idea was to follow some tracks in the sand:

Using my Harriet the Spy sleuth skills, I can tell you these tracks were made by 16th century shoes!

Steven, naturally, was skeptical.

"Who cares about colonists? Why can't we go to Sonic? I hate being in natural light."

So I once again had to encourage him onward.

"Steven Matthew Wiggins, do NOT make me come over there. We are RESCUING THOSE COLONISTS and that's FINAL."

When we got to the top of the giant sand dune, it was really quite windy.

Probably why the lost colonists did not simply climb on top to look for the way home.

Everyone knows colonists are afraid of wind.

BUT THEN, in the distance:

Hark! The Lost Colonists! They have somehow acquired backpacks among the sands!

"Hey! You guys! We've totally been looking for you for like hundreds of years!!"

"Yeah, we're kind of busy right now filming a movie or shooting a backpack commercial or something. Catch you later!"

"Okay, ttyl! Call me!"

CASE CLOSED. At the first place I looked. Seriously, I am ace at this solving historical mysteries thing. Look out, Stonehenge, you’re next.

To celebrate, we climbed this lighthouse:

Currituck!

So many stairs right now!

Me: Looking for more colonists I can save

Steven: Auditioning for a shampoo commercial for some reason.

“He’s got the urge to Herbal! On Currituck Lighthouse!” That is definitely going to be Herbal Essences new slogan. Just you wait.

I would only cutenap ones that were also wearing adorable sweaters. Oh wait, that's all of them.

The first competition involved walking your dog around in a circle to music, and then getting them to sit when the music stopped. Like musical chairs, but with dogs.

This was the eventual victor, clearly with a fashionvantage.

Then the limbo! Miniature doxin limbo was maybe what I’ve been waiting for all my life. Sorry, Steven.

When the bar got too low, a lot of them would try to industriously dig a hole. The kids I used to play limbo with at the library would never have thought of that.

Like so:

"Dude, I could totally get through...

… if you hadn’t dressed me in a utilikilt this morning”

The last competition I stayed for before I perished of cold was the “bobbing for weiners” competition, where two dogs went head to head in an attempt to eat a slice of hot dog out of a small tray of water.

They were surprisingly reticent to go for the hot dogs. I could totally have won this one.

There was also a costume contest, which is why you may see one in the background that looks like a lobster.

Unfortunately, there was no cuteness contest.

1. The Water Tower

So this water tower was originally a really drab blue, but they decided to jazz it up when I was in middle school and hired an artist to paint gigantic native Florida birds on it with some clouds in the background. This made total sense, until someone decided that the water tower’s natural shape would lend itself really well to painting a big orange cage over them all. Obviously this image creates a few troubling philosophical questions: if those are clouds WITHIN the cage, did some even larger person put a cage over THE SKY? How could these birds, even at normal size, even fit in a bird cage? Is this a metaphor for human interference being akin to a harmful cage put over THE ENTIRE NATURAL WORLD? Or, we could go with my immediate reaction the first time I saw it: “OMGOD THAT OCTOPUS IS ATTACKING THOSE BIRDS!”
Apparently the city agrees with my complaints because they wanted to paint over it awhile ago, but people complained, saying it was “good for giving directions”.

2. The Panama Canal Museum

Not too many people know that Seminole, Florida is home to the The Panama Canal Museum. Including me, until a few summers ago when a lady who worked there came into the library asking for books about teddy bears for their Theodore Roosevelt celebration. Naturally I had to investigate. Their website is actually pretty classy for something that’s in the parking lot of Kmart in Seminole’s glorious mall, so I naturally used my one day off that week to go visit. It’s pretty much a single room next to the bank, and the exhibits are mostly pictures on the walls. Oh, and this headless mannequin:

Yep. That's the picture of a head they've stuffed into its gaping neck hole.

Clearly, a classy joint. They even have a gift shop where you can buy jewelry, The Panama Canal Museum Cookbook, and postcards to send saying that you’re not at The Panama Canal, but it’s the next best thing. Clearly a must see for any visit to Seminole, or at least Seminole Mall.

3. Seminole Community Library

Okay, maybe this is only one of the best things because I’ve spent so much of my life there (especially the last few years), but you’ve got to admit, this is one pretty sweet puppet theater:

Taken from the City's website; you'd think they would've gotten an official photographer who understood about flashes

And now that I don’t work there, it’s even sweeter, because I don’t have to worry about kids climbing on it, jumping on the chairs, throwing puppets at each other, swinging on the curtains, or, one memorable night, using it as a bathroom. I would definitely suggest putting on a puppet show if you happen to visit (don’t worry, it’s been cleaned). Also, thanks to the eccentric book-buying habits of my former supervisor, we now have the County’s premiere collection of cat-related picture books. So, you know, that’s something.

4. Publix

But not just any Publix. The Publix where Rob ate peas out of a can in the parking lot all because he saw them on a billboard:

The mystery to this picture is how we got the can open in the parking lot

And, okay, it’s not like Jeremy’s house, in that you aren’t having food pushed on you at every turn or discovering the secrets of Jeremy’s psyche, but there is a lot of sleeping baby holding involved, and that’s never bad:

OMG so tiny!

So I would say to definitely go for it, if you have the opportunity/really nice cousins who don’t mind you eating their food and sleeping on their couch while they’re still sleep deprived.

They also have two fairly large dogs whom Steven spent a fair amount of time wrestling with around the time this picture got taken (otherwise they became preoccupied with licking the baby’s toes). Unfortunately there are no pictures of Steven lying on the ground with two large dogs attempting to lick his face and bite each other at the same time. Rest assured; it really happened.

In conclusion, the Grand Canyon was probably a great experience once. I think I would have been overwhelmed if I could have seen it alone, so vast and silent. But being surrounded by tourists pretty much dampened any great emotions I may have had. So, not wanting to add to the problem, I took no pictures or documentary videos (sorry for the graphic-less post–clearly this will give Bova further ammunition for her blog war campaign). Instead I walked down and away, as far as time would allow, to sit on a rock on the edge and watch gigantic ravens flying thousands of feet above the ground, but still far below me.

Just Like When Neil Armstrong Visited

To be fair, a Floridian and a Texan are not the crack team you need to really ace the Sledding World Finals. Especially not on sand. It also probably would’ve been better if we hadn’t visited during the absolute hottest part of the day. As we were walking back to Trixie–which I thought must be a mirage for awhile–I realized I’d lost my car keys. Luckily, Steven also has a copy but we went back and dug through all likely piles of sand to try to find them. No such luck. Then Steven tried to film my sweating, gnat-covered misery. I was not happy.

So I decided to lash out publicly at Josh Langsfeld, whom I hold personally responsible for everything.

Happily, there was a Volkswagen dealership in Las Cruces. Not so happily, they said they needed to order a new key from the factory instead of copying Steven’s and that it would cost $290. Instead, I decided to keep a very, very close eye on the one copy we still have.

Don’t worry, though. I decided to soothe my wounded spirit by checking into a hotel with an indoor pool and nice pillows. And while floating, breathing in the too-chloriney smell of my childhood and staring up at the inexplicable hot air balloon mural on the ceiling, I found it within myself to forgive Josh Langsfeld. FOR NOW. If something goes wrong in Albuquerque, you KNOW whom I will hold personally responsible.

Texas is so freakin huge.

We’ve been driving all day and only ended up in Comanche Springs, STILL 219 miles from El Paso. And most of it after San Antonio looked a lot like this:

DESOLATION. Also, OIL!

And, okay, maybe I’m lying when I said we’ve been driving ALL day. We did stop in Seguin, Texas, a town whose promotional posters claim that it is “Aged to Perfection”, which is true if here “perfection” means “peeling paint and abandoned buildings”. Why stop here? To see the World’s Second Largest Pecan.

Oh, Seguin. Even your novelty landmark glory is second-rate.

Here is a video Steven Wiggins took (badly) of me explaining the glory of the pecan. I assume the shakiness is due to pecan excitement.

Shocking surprise ending: there is NO Dairy Queen in Seguin. Sad times.

1. Its Wikipedia Page

My favorite fact about Humble is definitely that its Wikipedia Page features this picture prominently:

You Know Your Town Is Classy when the Highway Exit to get to it is a "Point of Interest"

2. The Dump

Now with ravenous bands of seagulls!

Little known fact: all of Rice’s trash ends up here in the Atascocita Landfill! If you ever want to revisit that old 80s costume you couldn’t bear to look at anymore or the Bio homework you threw out after you dropped being a premed and started having a life, Humble is the place to go! This is by far the biggest and most important aspect of Humble. Apart from the airport, natch.

3. It’s Pronounced without the “H”

The first time I heard about Humble was on my second date with Steven Wiggins (the first being Screw Date), during which a drunk man at a bowling alley told us that his girlfriend was also from there, and that she often beat him for pronouncing the “H”.

Drunk Man: Man, how am I supposed to know you don’t say the H, man? It has an H! What are we, man, French or something?
Steven: Lots of people make that mistake. It’s no big deal.
Drunk Man: (big, scared eyes) My girlfriend once kicked me right in the balls for saying the H. (to me, loudly) DON’T SAY THE H! WHATEVER YOU DO!
Me: Okay.
Drunk Man: Okay. (pause) Do you want to be on my bowling league?

Naturally, this made a lasting impression.

4. “The Fast Food Capital of Texas”

Steven’s particular suburb of Humble, Atascocita, touts itself on its own website as being “The Fast Food Capital of Texas”, an impressive claim, which they back up with the admittedly solid evidence of this logo collage:

Hey, at least they're proud

MS Paint: clearly the best way to prove any point. I’m not sure if this claim is legitimately true, but they do have at least six Sonics within a ten minute radius of Steven’s house. He already google Earthed our apartment in Chapel Hill next year and discovered the nearest Sonic is thirty minutes away. He has thus deemed Chapel Hill a “thirsty wasteland”.

5. The Park That Claims to have Buffalo

When I first went to this park, on the shores of murky Lake Houston, I kept seeing these signs for buffalo but was unable to locate them:

Granted, it's a confusing sign. Is it a buffalo or Jeremy Caves?

I guess I was envisioning herds of mighty bison having free run of the park, crashing children’s birthday parties and smashing the pinatas beneath their hooves. In reality this is not a “Caution: Buffalo” sign but a “This way, down a road that looks closed you can see some clearly malnourished and miniature buffalo” sign. I guess I just didn’t realize that the drawing on the sign is actually to scale. In conclusion: Buffalo at Humble’s parks=mad anti-climactic.