Wow, we’ve been on the road for ten days already. Time has really flown by!
Today started out as a slow and easy day. We lounged around the trailer until we got the gumption to wash our clothes.
One of the things we’re forced to do on the road is wash clothes at laundermats. Since we were only 100 yards from the laundermat, we traipsed our sacks of dirty clothes over on foot. Marianne thought we had too much laundry so she wanted to drive, but I knew I needed the exercise so we hoofed it. Upon arrival we discover that there was only one lady washing clothes there, unfortunately that lady was part of the RV part and washing the RV park’s official dirty laundry. As a result this laundry was closed, but the park was large enough to offer a second laundry, but about ¼ mile away. So, in the heat, we traipsed our dirty clothes back to our trailer and drove to the other facility.
Nothing exciting happened at the laundermat. It took about 90 minutes to wash and dry all of our clothes and towels. That’s an advantage of a public laundermat, one can wash and dry one’s clothes concurrently, rather than consecutively, thereby turning a five hour job at home into an almost bearable activity.
That evening we were going to have one last dinner with Deb and Tim, Janet and Rick, and Leesey, before leaving Austin the next day.
Marianne thought it would be a great idea if we presented Deb with a photobook of all the best photos we shot two nights earlier. She checked with a local CVS Pharmacy and discovered that they could make a photobook in less than 20 minutes. But now we had only about two hours to edit and sort all of our photos before the photo department closed at CVS and then drive over to the Oasis restaurant for dinner.
We scrambled not only to pare 285 photos into less than 100, but we had to edit then to make sure they’d be as good as we could make them. That accomplished, I then exported them to USB thumb drive to take over to CVS, but the perfect ordered that we’d saved the photos in was now totally scrambled. Try as I might, I could not get the Google Picasa software to export the photos into that perfect order I wanted. The only way I could guarantee my desired order was to rename each and every one of the 99 photos we ended up with. I boring, tedious job, but I did it.
Then we rushed out to the CVS with minutes to spare to get there before it closed. We got the photos all loaded into their machine and 20 minutes later we had a beautiful bound photobook.
Now we had to rush to the restaurant. But while we were waiting to get the photobook, the heavens opened up with a torrential thunderstorm. I ran through the rain to get the truck and drive it to the door of the CVS to pick up Marianne who guessed she might be too sweet to run through the rain without dissolving!
The rain and lightning were everywhere, but then, less than 50 feet in front of us, a bolt of lightning slammed into a telephone pole, kaboom! The top of the pole became a huge ball of bright light, and simultaneously the sound of the thunder rocked the truck. Yikes, that was close.
Now we just wanted to make it back to the trailer, because I had left the awning extended. A downpour would turn the awning into a swimming pool and snap the supports – don’t ask me how I know this, it’s good enough to know that I’ve been there, done that. But miraculously the rain hadn’t gotten to the trailer yet. I hurried and retracted the awning, got back into the car to drive to the restaurant.
We were outdriving the rain to get to the restaurant, but just when we got there, the rain was starting, so I elected to use their valet parking in order to avoid walking the couple of hundred yards from their parking lot to the restaurant. Lucky we did, because the heavens were begin to open up with a vengeance as we entered the restaurant.
We were the first couple at restaurant and a few minutes after we arrived Marianne received a phone call from Leesey, they had to pull over and get under some sort of overhang three separate times to avoid being pelted by quarter-sized hail. The view from the patio of the Oasis was totally obliterated by a torrential rainstorm. By this time valet parking was full, and some of the restaurant patrons looked like they had gone swimming with their clothes on when they arrived.
Deb and Tim arrived, they were smart, and they each had an umbrella. Fortunately they didn’t have to drive but a mile to get to the Oasis. We sat down at the bar to get a drink, and by the time the drinks arrive, our restaurant seating for seven was ready. As we sat down at our table, Janet, Rick, and Leesey arrived, somehow they had avoided looking like the wet rats we had seen just minutes earlier.
We all had another round of drinks, when the conversation somehow drifted to menopausal women and their hot flashes. When Leesey admitted she also suffered from this malady, Marianne whipped an over-sized electric fan out of her purse, handed it to Leesey, telling her she never travels anywhere without her fan. The table broke up in laughter that Marianne would have that big of a fan in her purse.
Yet that fan came in very handy just minutes later when the fajitas arrived sizzling on their plates and billowing smoke right into everyone’s faces. This time I whipped out the fan, turned it on, and blew that smoke right away. Another hilarious moment, but then if you had been there you’d have probably appreciated the humor even more!
Our photobook gift to Deb was a hit. We also had a great time reminiscing about what a great time we all had at the party. Once again, great friends, great food, and great times.
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