I've heard lots of teen girls and women talk about the Twilight books by Stephanie Meyer.  And now they are making a movie about the first one.  They have developed a cultish, Harry Potter-like following.  The 4th and final book comes out this weekend, with late night parties at bookstores in a very similar fashion to the Harry Potter book releases.  Well, I finally decided to try the books and see what all the hype was about.  Honestly, I wasn't expecting much...after all, these are romance books about vampires written for teen girls, not really my first choice of literature. And the basic premise of the books sounded a little questionable:  Teenage girl Bella falls in love with Edward.  Edward also falls in love with Bella. But Edward is a vampire, and while he loves her, he also wants to kill her and drink her blood.  So that's kind of a problem.

But, I have been pleasantly surprised and have become just slightly obsessed with reading these books.  I got Twilight from the library last week and read it in a day.  I restrained from buying the books and waited to get the next 2 from the library.  I got those yesterday, started New Moon yesterday evening and finished it this morning.  Now I've tried to be productive today, but I'll probably start Eclipse tonight and finish it by tomorrow.  Then the 4th book comes out on Saturday.  And I might have to go buy that one, because the library waiting list will be forever long. 

So you can see I've gotten a little addicted.  They are not the most well-written books out there; they're not as good as Harry Potter.  And you have to accept the fact that they are about vampires and werewolves and obviously are not going to be realistic.  But with all that said, they are really, really good.  And surprisingly clean.  I was expecting them to be kind of trashy, but they are not at all.  No bad language, no sex and a few interesting spiritual discussion points.  I'll find out in the next couple of days if the final 2 books are as entertaining and interesting as the first 2.

Continuing with our trip...

Saturday afternoon: We went swimming at the park's pool, then came back and fixed lunch at the campsite.  Then we went to Dairy Queen before we went to see The Dark Knight.  I enjoyed the movie and thought Heath Ledger was very impressive as the Joker.  And I really enjoyed sitting inside in the air-conditioning for a while.  We came back and had dinner, then finished the Yahtzee portion of our tournament.  Daniel tried to make a comeback, but I ended up winning in the end!!  We ended the night finishing season 5 of 24 on DVD with Daniel's computer in the tent.

Sunday:  We drove about an hour south to Louisville and went to Southeast Christian Church.  That was my first time there, and it was a little intimidating.  Actually, the only intimidating part was the parking lot.  They had police escorts to help us park and to help us walk in the crosswalks and busses to transport you from the parking lots to the church building.  It was a little overwhelming...but I guess when you have to get 16000 people in and out in one weekend, those things are necessary.  Once we were inside and church started, I felt more comfortable and enjoyed the service.  After church, we had lunch at Cheesecake Factory and wandered around a mall.  At Daniel's suggestion, we took an unintentionally long short cut through Louisville before driving back to Madison.

We wandered around historic downtown Madison for a little while, but it was really hot and most of the stores were clsoed.  So we went back to the park and started our Uno tournament in the lodge. After the first few games, I was winning by quite a bit.  We went back to the campsite for a little bit and planned to fix supper, but a storm was brewing and it started to get nasty quickly.  I thought it would be better to be back at the lodge in a sturdy building rather than our tent.  Plus the lodge had air conditioning and internet access, things we didn't have at the campsite.  So we drove back to the lodge, just as the wind started to really pick up.  As we walked into the building, the power went out.  So we sat in the lodge and played Uno in the semi-dark and watched the storm come in over the river.  Here's a picture of the clouds moving in:

The storm turned out to be pretty bad with trees and power lines down not only in the park but around the whole county.  Once it cleared off at about 8 pm, we drove back into Madison to find some dinner.  Then we went to check out the damage at our campsite.  There were roads closed in the park because so many trees were down.  I was afraid that either a tree would be on our tent or the 60 mile per hour winds would have blown the tent away (like it did the trees in the park) or the tent would not be able to withstand the pouring, driving rain.  But we got back and everything was just fine.  Our little tent weathered the storm perfectly.  Unfortunately, the same couldn't be said for the 3 guys we saw throwing their tent in the dumpster as we pulled back into the campground.  They didn't seem too happy.

The good news about the storm was the cool weather that followed it.  The temperature dropped from 95 to 65 degrees in about a half hour.  It was too wet to do anything on Sunday night, so we watched Vantage Point on DVD in the tent and hoped the storms were done.  Oh, and I forgot to mention that I won our Uno game as well during the storm, making me the champion of the games for the trip!

Monday:  We started packing up and had to let the tent and everything dry out.  We fixed lunch, packed up and headed back to Indianapolis.  We made a couple of pit stops at an outlet mall and Dairy Queen (I really enjoyed the Thin Mint Cookie Blizzard on this trip) before going back to Daniel's house for Monday night. 

Well that was our trip...today I had another doctor's appointment and ultrasound.  They weren't able to see everything last time, but today she was much more cooperative.  We were able to see her healthy heart and umbilical cord.  She is still a girl, they confirmed that for us again today.  And we could see her arms and legs moving and kicking, at the same time that I was feeling her move...which was kind of crazy.  Here's a picture of me at 24 weeks, only 16 left to go!