_{& I'm seriously not making this shit up...}

Linville, North Carolina. Home of the infamous Linville caverns and red-necks. SO MANY RED-NECKS. D:

Anyway, I went on a one-day trip - with my parents and brother - to Linville. (Obviously.) Oddly, it was enjoyable. The three-hour car ride there, then another one back sucked, but - overall, it was enjoyable.

OK, LITTLE CHILDREN: STORY TIME!

----------

Alright, to start off, my family is full of weird people. Just to get that out there.

So, Dad - who is driving - decides to take my mother to the BIGGEST FREAKING GOOD WILL ON EARTH. (She didn't find anything, while I found a Hamtaro movie & a cell phone cover, which I found hilarious). We go to Good Will sometimes. Shut up. We're not rich. Get over it.

Moving on, we get to the Caverns, and - thankfully - we only wait about 15 minutes, which we spend talking to each other (thankfully, my relationship with my brother is slightly better).

CAVERNS. ARE. FUN.

I liked the caverns! There was a really long one that is dubbed the "Un-name-able" stalagtite. It's half-green, so many of the name suggestions were Pickle, Cucumber, Davy Jone's Cousin, Gumby, you get it. One of the other tourists suggested, 'Fried Eggs', and Dad laughed.

Then, halfway through the tour, the lights went out. Apparently, this does not happen very much. Especially since he had just shown us the "Total Darkness" part of the tour (that's when he purposefully cuts out the lights to show you how it would be without the lantern). The lights went out for about 5 minutes, then they came back on, and that was that. No biggie.

(I also took a bunch of pictures, which I will probably post some of.)

After the tour, we all went to O'Charly's. Considering that we're not rich, but not dirt poor, I didn't say anything. Now, I can say that the service sucked. The food was great - oh, yeah - but the service was horrible. It took the waitress 10 minutes just to ask us what we wanted to drink. >.< But then, she spilt Sprite_(c) on my mother, which just made the rest of us mutter a non-verbal, "Oh, holy crap."

Needless to say, we got a free meal that would've normally cost around $75.

Of course, the day doesn't end there. On the way home, there are - like - 10 police officers standing by a road, checking IDs. The whole time, before we actually got up to the officer, Dad was making remarks about 'Hiding the evidence', 'Snort faster!', and mumbling incessantly as if he was drunk. Mom disapproved, but I was choking and crying from lack of air.

We also discussed Michael Jackson. Not exactly a "child-orented" conversation:




Me: "Didn't he get, like, a ton of surgeries on his nose? Is it still really his?"

Brother: "Of course not." (is playing my DS, since his broke)

Mom: "He didn't like who he was, Maiden. Honestly, by the way he acted, he seems like he was abused."

Me: (nods) "He was. He said that, when he and his brothers were in the Jackson 5, his dad would sit in front of them with a belt in his hands and whip 'em if they got it wrong."

Mom: (shakes her head) "Sad."

Me: "I don't think he really went crazy until after his skin started changing color, though."

Brother: (is now interested) "Didn't he have a disease?"

Dad: (snorts, laughing) "Disease? Ha! The only one in his family to have that 'disease'!"

Mom: "He --"

Dad: "He wanted to be white!"

Mom: "-- wasn't comfortable in his own skin."



Ouch.