Alabama loves football

Another exciting weekend has come and gone, and this one was something special.  For Labor day weekend we were privileged with saturday, sunday, and monday off (normally just sunday and monday) and boy did we take advantage. In order to graduate from AmeriCorps you need 80 Independent volunteer hours aside from the ones assigned to you during the week. So River 7 was on top of things and banged out 7 hours on saturday as we volunteered at South Alabama Cares which is an aids testing facility.  Fortunately we had the honor of painting more, which has been a good and bad thing.  It's good for me because I love painting and  know what I'm doing; the only bad part is I'm a pretty messy painter and we didn't bring our coveralls to the job so I got paint all over my uniform and I'm only 1 week into the year, uh oh! Anyways after that some of the locals I met in a local bar called the daily double gave me a call and invited myself and a few of my team members over for a southern cookout.  I had no idea what I was in for but was pretty excited to head on over there with Danielle, Cain, and Mac. We were fortunate enough to get picked up by them from our housing and luckily didn't have to travel more than 2 miles to their house. Going to this cookout has been one of the best decisions of my entire life.  Not only were the people beyond hospitable but the food was beyond amazing.  Now I pass up on quality food all the time for its lack of nutritional value... but on Sunday... I did not hold back for anything (and you'll see why when you look at the pictures). What an amazing time I had getting to know some locals in Mobile, Alabama and the stories they had to share with us. After spending about 5 hours there we headed back home and made the rest of our team jealous when they had beans and rice for dinner while we had ribs and much much more! Just as I thought the weekend couldn't get any better, on Monday the whole team went to Dauphin Island which is on the Gulf Coast in Alabama. The beaches were beautiful here and we got to spend all day in the sun (bye bye farmers tan!). My team polished off a full bottle of sunscreen (thanks ma) and I even used some of the aftersun aloe. Overall an amazing weekend in Alabama and tomorrow we start working with Habitat possibly putting up a new house, who knows though they constantly change what we do... Alright I want to get some of these awesome pics from the cookout and beach up so you can see where Ive been at all weekend...oh and the sky was amazing tonight, I was on the phone with Brittany from River 5 and saw a shooting star from the driveway which was pretty cool. still trying to find a nice area that doesn't have much light around it, but for now I'm pretty happy with what I got!