Trip Pictures....Memory lane...

So this is a picture of my grandparents house in Carbondale. I made Turner drive by it so that I could take pictures, and he thought I was a psycho as the Highway Department now owns it and he's pretty sure they are putting me on a terrorist watch list :-) Either way, this is the place I had most of my Christmas' growing up and where I did laundry in college and where I went in college when I was sick and wanted to be taken care of (and a million other things) so I took some pictures of it...

And then on to Mattoon, where my mom and I crept around taking pictures of my Grandma Georgia's house. It looks pretty good, all things considered, as the house next door that was owned by these people named the Browns who always kept it immaculate is in a state of disrepair. I'm glad that whoever is living in Grandma Georgia's house is taking good care of it.

Granted, they do park a lot of cars in front and that makes it hard to (creepily) take pictures that aren't filled with cars. You can see some of the top of the transom windows on the front porch that I always loved in my grandma's house.

Then we went down the alley so we could see the backyard. The garage is still standing, which is pretty impressive as it was old when I was a kid. It had a dirt floor and come to think of it, may have been the only dirt floored garage I ever knew. Her shed is still there, too, which is great as I have lots of happy memories in it. As a kid, I can remember one summer when my cousin Sarah and I made a "club" that we "convinced" my cousing (her sister) Wendy to join. Wendy was in her late teens or so and had had a leg surgery so she was in a cast, but she spent a great deal of time hanging out with us in our very hot, very dark "clubhouse".

This last shot is of Friendship Park. It's a park that is about 2 blocks from my Grandma's house. I used to be allowed to walk there by myself (it is one of the first places I can remember being allowed to walk to by myself. The land for the park was donated when an old house burnt down and in the beginning, the park was built around the basement of the old house. You used be able to go down the original basement stairs, but at some point in my childhood, they filled it in. You can still see the structure of the old house in the design of that part of the garden, though.