I'm Ready to Burst

I just weighed myself on my scale and I have officially gained 10 pounds in the past 3 days. I feel like I'm going to explode. If I see anymore food this weekend, I think I'm going to cry.

Other than feeling like Thanksgiving's stuffed turkey the trip has been great. We took advantage of the after Thanksgiving's Day sales to buy a new gadget for our travels. We bought a portable GPS unit, something we've been talking about investing in for a while. This thing is great! It has the requisite touch screen, voice prompts, blue-tooth wireless phone integration and, best of all, it already has the maps for the U.S. and Europe loaded up in it. You can also set it to have famous people tell you directions, although, now that I think of it, it might be scary to have Mr. T yelling at you to take a left. We're looking forward to putting it to the test on the streets of Turkey, but, for now, we're happy with it finding every Sonic restaurant along the highway.

Right now we are in beautiful and scenic Oak Ridge, Tennessee; which is my home town. For those of you who don't know, Oak Ridge has quite the history. It was a secret government installation established in 1942 as part of the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bomb. For the first five years of it's existence it...well, didn't exist. It did not appear on maps, the roads were not paved and you could not enter or exit the city without passing through armed checkpoints. In addition, the city was broken up into separate communities which were barred from socializing with each other in order to prevent any one person from truly knowing what was going on at any of the nuclear installations. While the city no longer is a secret, it continues to play in important roll in promoting American innovation and competitiveness in areas such as science, engineering, physics and even medicine and is the home of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory which does important research in nuclear physics and nanotechnology. When people tell me I'm bright, it's for a reason, har har. Josh doesn't really think it's much to look at but I happen to think it's a pretty cool place and am quite proud to call it my home town.

Tomorrow we drive back to Virginia and back to life as usual. This has been a somewhat difficult two weeks for me so I'm looking forward to some normalcy.