The day started like this:

THE most Jetsons restaurant ever, originally uploaded by daradactyl.

We headed out to LAX, excited to be going on our Mexican Vacation. But the traffic was worse than expected, mostly because of detours due to the wildfires. We got to LAX an hour before the flight. We quickly got in line to check the bag. But it was the wrong line. They didn't accept international flights. So they directed us to another line. But it was much longer. By the time we got to the self-serve terminal, it was too late. We couldn't do self-check in, so it told us to see an agent. There were several, all of whom ignored our requests for assistance. That's when I started crying. I don't normally do that in public, but I was completely losing it and besides I thought it might help the pity factor.

Finally, someone looked through our papers and directed us to another line where we would have to wait to get rebooked on another flight. And so off we went to another line to wait for 90 minutes to get an agent to rebook our flights. If we had been directed to the correct self-serve terminals in the first place we would have made the flight.

So there we were in LAX with 24 hours to kill. So we spent a few of them at Encounters, the Jetsonesque restaurant in the middle of LAX. As you board the elevator, creepy theremin music serenades your ascent. We sampled all the drinks and decided it might as well be a 6 day vacation instead of 5........

Carnton Plantation

Carnton Plantation
Originally uploaded by daradactyl.

Sunset on the front porch. This is the plantation featured in the book, Widow of the South. I had assumed I would be taking more photos but the tour lasted until way after dark. We did however manage to see the many, many blood stains on the floor, still there 140 years later. There was also a couple of closet doors that opened mysteriously. It was kinda spooky. But a beautiful mansion. The family graveyard is in the background and a Confederate graveyard is just beyond that. Acording to our guide, after the Battle of Franklin, the Union Army (eventually) came to collect their dead. The Confederates were buried where they fell in shallow graves. After a couple of years as hands and such started to poke through, well, it became an issue. So Carrie McGavock, Mistress of the plantation, designated a plot of land for the Confederate cemetary. Workers were hired to find and exhume the nearly 2000 men and reinter them into a proper cemetary. Families still come today to find relatives.

The bloodstains on the floor, at this point illuminated by big spot lights since it was after dark while we were there, were mostly by the windows, which apparently was where they were doing most of the operating, or to be exact, the amputating. Limbs were piled up, legend says to the second story window. I think it wasn't quite thåt tall, but there were a lot of severed limbs. The closet doors that opened were creepy but the whole place had a very unsettling feeling about it. Much like an empty hospital, even though the house has been restored to the way it might have been the day of the battle BEFORE they turned it into a field hospital.

Fortunately, this house is still in the middle of wide open fields, so you really get a sense of what a plantation house was like. Very different than being 6 feet from my neighbors on each side as I am in LA.