After leaving the beach, we headed to Aiken to visit my family.  It was nice to spend some time with my parents.  We didn't arrive until Saturday afternoon, so that gave them a chance to take care of their weekend chores before we arrived.   My mom has lost a lot of weight (she's about 15 pounds lighter than me!) and fixed several delicious meals while we were there.  She also made a birthday cake for me, which was nice because on my actual birthday Jason & I were camping.  Anyway, it was great to visit and have some good home cooked meals.  We went over to my brother's house Saturday and Sunday evenings.  He has a new, bigger house for all their five kids!  All the kid's bedrooms are upstairs with a big common area that serves as a play room.  It's nice that they have their own space so all the toys aren't all over the living room.  It was good to see all the kids - the twins are walking all over the place now.  Back in June when I visited they were just learning to stand up on their own.  Sean (~2.5 months) was much bigger than I expected and like all his siblings very well tempered.  I think he only cried once the entire time I was there and not that bad.  I was really surprised that he is sleeping 9 hours a night.  Andrew and Monica changed the rest of the kids bedtime to 7pm, so there's plenty of adult time in the evening.  I took some pictures of everyone - I'll post those in the next few days.

After SC, Jason and I headed up to NC to see the leaves.  A few years ago we were in western North Carolina the first week of October and the leaves weren't changing at all.  This year, we get there a week and half later and it's already the tail end.  So hard to time visits to see the leaves at their peak!  We camped just outside Asheville and sadly had absolutely awful weather.  We actually ended up spending an extra day in Aiken to avoid a day of heavy rain, but still ended up getting plenty of rain while we were there.  The campground was about 20 minutes from Asheville, which was nice so we could escape into the city.  One of Jason's friends and his wife met us for three nights of camping and we went through so much fire wood!  It was really cold and wet...by the last day the high was in the low 40's, so we didn't do much outdoor stuff, other than sit by the fire.  We had planned to go biking, but it was just too cold.  We managed to get in a hike off the Blue Ridge Parkway, so that was nice.

We got back home today - that was such a long drive!  We did it three days, 6 hours, 11 hours, and 5 hours.  I really just can't handle being in the car long periods of time like I use to.  Speaking of which, I had my 35th birthday a few days ago.  We didn't really do anything since we were camping, a bit anticlimactic, but I haven't done much for my birthday in quite a few years anyway.  This was kind of a big one and I just let it quietly slip by...

I start my new job on Thursday.  I have so many mixed feelings about returning to work.  I have a lot I want to get done with my day and half before I'm gainfully employed, so I guess I should get to it.