Continental breakfast behaviors

Okay, so Marty has a sick mind: Thursday morning she observed the dining behaviors of the guests in the LaQuinta at the complementary breakfast. One older couple, probably 70's, each ate a big bowl of cereal topped with a large banana, followed by a hard boiled egg and a container of yogurt and topped off with 1/2 bagel each.  Rough estimate of calories was well over 600.  Might be their breakfast and lunch?  Another man had one bagel with cream cheese, plus three additional muffins and a bowl of cereal...talk about carb loading.  This healthy breakfast was probably closer to 800 calories or over.  Okay, she is sick.  Maybe it comes with needing to find something to observe.

Thursday we got out and about as the rain had ended and we had a slight warming, with our high up around 50.  There is a botanical garden not too far from us and then there are some of the squares to explore downtown along with a colonial period cemetery.  We got only downtown and to the Colonial Park.

We have checked once again with the Mercedes folks and have seen the FedEx tracking, showing the transmission still stuck in Chicago.  So, we cleaned out the camper refrigerator; all the veggies we had intended to use by now had remained in the fridge and were spoiled.  Oh well.  We are trying to get the motel to give us a room with a fridge and microwave so we can at least save on some of our meals.  This brings us back to the folks Marty was observing in the morning...we fully suspect that they were eating two meals worth of calories so they could skip lunch and save a few bucks in the process. It is understandable.

We headed into town to walk through the Colonial Park.  The entrance sign is below:

This is really quite a wonderful park/cemetery, however, David read online that Union soldiers damaged many of the early grave stones and hence there are fewer of them there than one would have expected.

The above is a panorama of the cemetery.  It is quite an open space and provides a nice place to walk and learn some history of this place.

 There are many tombstones that are for multiple members of the same family.

 We were stuck by this particular stone because it is for Morivian colonists!  We never had any idea that they were in this part of the country at such an early time.

Typical of so many trees here is the soft gentle Spanish Moss that hangs down and it is certainly pretty.

We also visited the beautiful St John the Baptist Cathedral...which is large enough that even from across the street is too big to capture with the iPad!

We also went to a place called the Growler Store.  We samples six brews and Marty got David a very fancy stainless growler (which is supposed to keep beer good for up to four weeks if it is not opened).  Of course, it had to be filled so we could check it out with our dinner.

There are many free trollies around town and there are also taxis like this which you can hire for sightseeing.  The "driver" certainly gets a good workout.

So we are now in more of a conservation mode and will buy most of our dinners at the grocery store vs dining out every meal every day.  This evening we had a great kale salad from Kroger's to go along with our beer and there were also one-serving sizes key lime pies for our dessert.  Cannot beat a good thing like that.