Due to the crazy food prices around here, Ethan and I have joined Sam's Club and make a monthly pilgrimige to Tupelo to do our grocery shopping. It's an hour drive but it's a pretty one. My favorite thing about it is that there are lots of wide open spaces, at least they're wide open for Mississippi. There are lots of farms along the way and it's so nice to be able to look out over the fields and not have to just stare at the trees flashing by.
Once you get to Tupelo though, you are back into the trees. In fact you can hardly see the town for the trees.
This picture was taken right off the exit into downtown Tupelo.
So here's a bit of trivia. Did you know that Elvis was born in Tupelo Mississippi? We saw signs advertising his birthplace so we went to check it out. It was a fun little detour, but nothing too exciting.
This is possibly the same kind of car that the Presley family used to move from Tupelo to Memphis. It may have been a different car, but they weren't sure so they picked this one for display outside the museum.
We could have toured the inside of the house, but somehow we didn't think it was big enough to hold $12/person worth of intrest.
I don't know though, maybe Ethan wishes I weren't so cheap...
Did you know that not only could he sing, play the guitar, and star in movies, but Elvis was also a great babysitter!! :)
Not only did we miss out on the tour of the house, but for an extra $3 we could've gone inside Elvis's childhood church and sat through a fake church service modeled after the ones he would have attended. They put on these fake services every 15 minutes every day.
Maybe I wasn't willing to pay three bucks to go to Elvis's church, but I might've thought about it if that had included the use of his out house...
The tailgating here starts the day before the game and doesn't end until the game does. There are people everywhere!
When we got to Noxubee we were headed around the end of the lake towards the western shore where the boats were waiting when Ethan noticed this little guy hanging out on the eastern shore of the lake. 
It's hard to tell exactly how big this guy is with the way his tail is curled to the side, but we decided that he's atleast 8 feet long and probably more than that. My mom didn't appreciate my excited phone call to tell her we were looking at a gator, mostly because I followed that bit of info with the fact that we were getting ready to take her first grandson out onto the same lake in a canoe. Apparently she was a bit unsettled the rest of the day. :) 
The canoeing was a blast. We were worried they wouldn't let us take Erik out, but they didn't have any problem with it. We put his car seat in the bottom of the boat and away we went. The cypress trees are changing color for the fall and they were all really pretty.
We were paddling along when all the sudden Ethan says, "what's this thing?". I look down in the water and inches from my hand I see this grayish brown scaly thing and I completely freak out! My first thought is that it's an alligator, then when I realize it's not one I think it's a huge snake. Ethan's trying to pull the thing out of the water with his paddle to get a look at it and all I can think is how mad he must be making the thing and that we're all going to flip into the water and get eaten by something. 
I turned out to be a plant of some kind. Once I finally calmed down again, it was kind of interesting to look at. 
We saw lots of Great Blue Herons and Snowy Egrets and all sorts of other waterfowl. There were turtles that would poke their heads out and watch us go by. It was all really beautiful and I wish I'd remembered sunscreen so we could've stayed out there longer. 
As always with our adventures, Erik slept through the whole thing. Someday he'll be so sad that he missed all this!
We scrounged around and came up with a costume for Erik. He wasn't too inpressed with it all but everyone thought he was pretty cute. 
One fun thing was the manequins in all the shop windows. Don't they look so life-like?
These girls are from the fashion department at the University here. They were in all the clothes stores and it was really fun to see. They did an awesome job looking like manequins. In fact, there was one store that had some of the models in it and some actual manequins and it was really hard to tell the difference. 
We had a really good time just wandering around watching the crowd and seeing what all the little shops had to offer...
...Erik did get a little tired of the whole thing though and decided to call it quits. 
