I'm glad I'm not in jail

Whitney and I went to the Texas Prison Museum yesterday. It's way out in Huntsville -- about an hour and a half away from our apartment.

The museum was a strange mixture of fascinating and depressing, with lots of stories about what it's like in prison, how prisoners have tried to escape, and how executions are performed. They even had a real electric chair, which they lovingly called 'ol Sparky. Yuck.

Whit and I have been to a lot of Smithsonian museums recently so the exhibit quality wasn't as high as we had (probably wrongly) expected, but overall it was a fun little hour of our Saturday.

But it was just an hour. That's a lot of driving for not a lot of museum, so we decided to explore Huntsville a little more and find a place to eat. We stumbled on the Farmhouse Cafe, a really cool little diner with an extra country feel. On the outside it looked like a dusty, creaky old building... but on the inside we found a surprisingly nice, bustling diner that was full of people. Lunch was really cheap there, and it was great food! Anytime you can get peaches, strawberries, and bananas as a side dish to your country fried steak, that's gotta be good.

After lunch we decided to surprise Andrea and Nate out in College Station. It was less than an hour drive from Huntsville, and Nate was probably getting too much homework done anyway. So we went and distracted them for a couple of hours, got some frozen yogurt, and took a tour around Texas A&M campus. It was really cool to see where Nate and Andrea live and go to school.

So in honor of this Fourth of July weekend, we celebrated our freedoms by going to a museum that portrayed incarceration. I'm glad I'm not in jail.