thanksgiving eve

I really cant think of anything else to blog about so I am going to write about the horrible day that sam and I had the Wednesday before thanksgiving. Ok, so we had arrived at my grandparents house in Hendersonville North Carolina at 9:00 Tuesday night with the idea that we would just stay up that night and finish up our synthesis essays. Well when we got there my grandmother had gone all out preparing this amazing dinner for us so we of course had to eat that and then my grandparents wanted to talk to us about school and our trip and our future plans over some tea and an incredible cake which my grandmother had made specifically for us. By the time we finished all that it was about 10:30 and since Sam and I had been driving all day and eaten a huge meal after already getting dinner on the road we were exhausted and couldn’t really even think straight. So after making plans to get up early the next morning and finish our papers by that afternoon, I made my way to my perfectly prepared bedroom and Sam was left to fend for himself with a bunch of sheets and a deflated air mattress in the basement.

For some reason neither of us thought to set any sort of alarm or anything that would ensure that we would actually get up early the next morning to finish our papers as planned so the next morning I woke up to the sun shining through my windows and some light flurries in the air and panicked. It was 11:30 and I quickly realized that there was no way our papers would be done before dinner now. I quickly trudged down to the freezing basement and woke up sam. In spite of our predicament we were both in a pretty good mood because of the cold snowy weather and the hot breakfast that my grandmother had prepared for us. After breakfast we began to work on our papers and quickly realized that my grandparents house was not the best place to study. Most of my relatives live in Hendersonville and for some reason everyone decided to come over to my grandparents house at the same time and talk like they hadn’t seen each other in years. Also, my grandparents don’t have wireless internet and they internet that they do have very rarely works. So sam and I realized that we wouldn’t get any work done at the house so we decided to go around town and try to find a place that had wireless internet.

Heres the part of the story where things begin to go down hill. Hendersonville is a very small town. Everyone knows each other and the most exciting thing that happened there recently was that some teenage “hoodlums” loosened the screws on some of the street signs on Main street and apparently caused a lot of confusion. So needless to say there really aren’t very many places that would have wireless internet. We found an amazing coffee place that we figured would have internet access but when we went inside they told us that they had turned off the internet because of the Thanksgiving holiday. Finally we were able to get internet in the Hendersonville public library and we spent the whole day there finishing up our papers. I finished mine at 7 when the library was closing but sam still had a lot of work to do so I decided not to put mine in the drop box until he could read over it and make corrections. So we went back to the house and Sam proceeded to work on his paper until 11:30 that night and just as he was finishing we realized that we had a huge problem.

The main problem was that we had no way of getting our papers off of my laptop and on to my grandparent’s computer. No one in the house had a flash drive or anything like that and most of my family was asleep anyway. The next big issue was that there was a huge thunder/hail storm going on outside and the power at my grandparents house began to flicker. I was able to send an e-mail to wendy on my grandparents computer saying that we were trying to find a way to submit our papers but after that the power went out. So at this point Sam and I were pretty much stuck. We didn’t really know how to proceed but we finally decided that we would drive around Main street (it really is the main street in hendersonville) and try to see if we could pick up any signal on my laptop. So we did this for a while in the pouring rain at midnight and after having no luck we decided to try some of the hotels in the area. Ok this is the absolute horrible part. Sam and I were both in our pajamas because we hadn’t thought things through and didn’t think we would have to get out of the car and we realized that we would have to go into these hotels and ask if they had internet because we couldn’t tell if the hotels did or not because the lights on the signs were out because of the storm. I think that the actual hotels must have had like emergency generators or something because they still had power. Anyway, we drove up to one place, parked and both of us ran in. Sam wanted to pull up to the door and let me run in to ask but I didn’t want to do that by myself so we both ended up getting soaked. As we walked into the hotel we must have looked pretty sketchy, especially to the old conservative Hendersonville people running the place. I mean my already somewhat threadbare pajamas were pretty much plastered to my soaking body and it was the middle of the night during a massive thunderstorm so we must have looked really strange. We asked the old lady working there if they had internet access and unfortunately they didn’t so we ran back to the car and drove to another hotel. This time we lucked out and were able to come inside and be stared at by the few hotel employees who happened to be in the lobby while we submitted our essays. Ok, I’d like to mention that at this time the dropbox had already closed and I couldn’t figure out how to submit the essay through ecourseware so I ended up emailing them to Wendy and making some lame sounding excuses about the weather and lack of internet access. Sam and I returned to my grandparents house absolutely soaked and had to stumble through the dark house (the power had finally gone out) and try to find some candles so we could at least see to get to our rooms. We finally did find some light and were able to dry off and go to sleep at last. I actually had an amazing Thanksgiving the next day but I don’t think ill ever forget driving frantically around Hendersonville in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm trying to find internet access.