Last Friday Beth and the kids and I headed out to Birmingham for spring break. This time we made reservations in advance, for the same motel in Bowling Green KY as before, so the drive down went much smoother. We arrived at Judy's on Saturday late afternoon. Alabama is still nice this time of year. We went to the outlet mall and Bass Pro Shop, we went to the zoo, we drove go-karts at the fun center down the road from Judy's, we toured the development where she lives. It has apparently been a wet spring in Alabama, because the lake by Judy's is really high and the spillway going over the dam to the waterfall is really swollen, such that the pedestrian bridge over the spillway river is pretty much inaccessible. We also headed on an excursion outside of town to a place we happened to see a brochure for at the welcome to Alabama rest stop with the rocket: DeSoto Caverns. It is a show cave with some really cool dripstone formations, not as big a cave as Marengo or anything but they give a cool tour of a wide open cave. They also have a fun area where there is a big wooden fence maze with several towers in it, and an area where the kids can pan for gold, and some other games as well while you're waiting for a tour. Alex and I did a bit of geocaching as well. Against his will, pretty much. We headed home Saturday. The new van did well for us on the trip, I must say. Except for the time the brakes were overheating and smoking on the first day down there, but that seemed to go away by itself when things cooled down.

I was 0-for-4 in the final four again. It just burns me that MSU lost to UConn in the elite 8...when they were clearly the better team. And then UConn wins. Urrrrrrrgh!