I don't get out much anymore, nor do I really care to. Besides work, I find pleasure in the living room, the kitchen and the backyard. There's not much acreage in any of those territories, but usually I find something to do. What other sights do I really need to see?

When my son, Tommy, came to visit for the first time in nearly three years, though, he expected to see more than our watermelon patch and the refrigerator. We managed to spend two weeks sightseeing places we had never or rarely seen, all without straying very far from the easy chair.

The first was the Atlanta airport. After I dropped him off there in 2006, I immediately developed double pneumonia, so I have avoided that place like, well, the plague. So far, though, no coughing.

A few days later, Tommy and I enjoyed a movie matinee. No one in the theater babbled, talked on their phones or played Marco Polo -- the reason I rarely go to movies anymore. It was a real treat to hear the film, and we had a good time. Thanks, courteous movie fans.

That weekend, we went to Riverwalk Augusta, along with my brother Mike and his wife, Barbara, who had come to see us while Tommy was in town. We cut the visit short because of rain, but it was such a treat to see water falling from the sky that watching it flow in the river wasn't a big deal anymore.

The next day, we went to Brunswick National Lanes with my stepdaughter Kylie, her husband, Dennis, and their kids. It was the second time in 25 years I had bowled. I broke 100, but I couldn't find a light-enough ball whose holes would accommodate my fingers. (It's easier to blame the equipment than my ability, I have found.)

Tommy liked to explore the stores he doesn't have back home, and we found out there were a bunch of new shops at Augusta Mall. In addition, we took in the gigantic Steve & Barry's clothing store in North Augusta; I longed for a Segway to get me from T-shirts at one end to baseball caps at the other.

On the way home, we ate lunch at the SNO-CAP Drive-In, an institution that, for some inexplicable reason, I had never been to. The taste of my hamburger took me back to my teen years, when we would cruise an endless triangle among the three locally owned drive-ins in my hometown.

After lunch, we stopped at Earth Fare, the organic foods supermarket, where we sampled the wares, chatted with a friendly manager about the hurricane and bought a cup of coffee.

Finally, we spent a few hours at the Augusta Museum of History, where we studied the exhibits about James Brown, local baseball and space flight in addition to looking at Indian artifacts, war weapons, golf history, planes, trains and automobiles. As a lagniappe, we found out that admission was only $1 in August.

We visited those places for Tommy's benefit, but I got an education, too. I felt like the proverbial New Yorker who never visits the Statue of Liberty until taking relatives from out of town. Without realizing it, we had taken a "staycation" -- burning little gasoline and returning home each night. Give it a try yourself.

Reach Glynn Moore at (706) 823-3419 or glynn.moore@augustachronicle.com.