Parade of What?

I had the best time yesterday. We went out in the afternoon to a Parade of Homes in the Raleigh area. My sister-in-law who is working toward her business degree had a real estate project to do, and thought it would be a fun way to do it looking at brand new several million dollar homes. One of them was 3 million to be exact. Yes, they were beautiful. Yes, they had luxuries I could not even imagine, including a built-in cappuccino machine, special wine storage, etc. But all I kept thinking was how hard it would be to clean the whole place,and how difficult it would be to be so spread out for my family. It would be great fun for entertaining - and yet with the whole bubble bursting economy we are learning the dangers of being "house poor". I think I'm with Queen Victoria on this one - things do taste better in small houses. Just as my friends said on my post with the picture of my dad's motor home that we have been staying in, life is so much simpler with less. How to get there is a different story. . .
The fun wasn't the houses -it was my brother passing gas then leaving a room, my sister accidentally turning up a whole house sound system up too loud, and laughing ourselves silly at the littlest things - especially the hoity-toity crowd commenting that the rooms, all of which were suites with their own walk-in closets and full baths, were too small, etc. Wow. We really rednecked it up!
After the tour of homes we went to look at some that were on the list in the downtown area, and ended up in a pretty bad neighborhood. My sister was in the car with me holding her cell phone out the car window to get the GPS to recognize where we were and give us some better directions. My brother, following us from behind and knowing the neighborhood was populated by gang members was saying things like "don't turn right, don't turn right" and of course the GPS would tell us to turn right. We laughed our heads off later. Thankfully, Laurie and I did not realize that we were in any danger at the time.
At the end of the evening we all got together had dinner at CiCi's pizza. The waitress remarked that we were a large family. We are. We tend to cause a lot of chaos and take up a lot of room, but one thing that is for certain, nobody in the whole place is ever having as much fun as we do when we get together!