Travels with Lucky: Day One of Two.
May. 29th, 2005 07:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cblj_backupWell, I'm off the road for the day and in the Best Western with wireless, which is the only excuse for its continued existence. We're in a little town near the Texas border which proudly proclaims "We were built for YOU!" to the travel-weary of the long midwestern highway.
Seriously, this town makes no bones about existing specifically for people to stop at on road trips. There are no less than twenty-one hotels of varying degrees of poshness, ten restaurants (no fast food, no Starbuckses*, only one bar) and two thousand residents.
* Isn't it illegal for any settlement larger than fifty not to have a Starbucks? I'm sure it's in the Bux Bylaws.
The teacher in me says that the place is screaming for a community theatre, but the cynic in me says that if people were really that interested in the arts, well, they wouldn't live HERE.
Anyhow, the trip was relatively quiet. We got underway about eight am after a little under an hour of packing; I feel that although I still have the same number of boxes as always, I'm proud of the fact that now all my belongings fit in a space five by ten by four instead of five by ten by ten. It's not exactly spartan, but it's certainly not like some of the trucks we saw on the road today. One full-sized moving van still couldn't hold this family's entire belongings, so they strapped a kiddie sandbox and a wheelbarrow to the back. Oy.
We didn't see much of anything of note for, oh, EVER, except for the remains of a very fatal looking two-truck head-on collision. We just...drove. I had thought about reading or working on the laptop or something, but after all the loading and cleaning and stress of the morning, I ended up staring at the landscape for several hours. It was about all the input I could handle.
We did have lunch in a romantic comedy, which was pretty funny.
Actually it was an Applebee's restaurant, but we ended up sitting just next to a group straight out of a Sandra Bullock family film. There were the grandparents, the two sons, the older son's wife, the three grandkids, and the girl that the older son's wife had clearly set up with the younger son, who was HAVING NONE OF IT. It cracked me up. Lucky asked why I was so quiet and I said I was watching the movie An Applebee's To Remember.
After lunch we stopped for gas and I ran in to buy some cold water bottles for the road. I was standing in line behind an elderly couple who were blowing their life savings on lottery tickets when I had a Lewis Black moment. In one of his stand-up routines, Lewis Black talks about overhearing something so ridiculous and bizarre that it might kill you if you thought about it too hard. Oddly, both his example ("If it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college") and mine both involve hoofed mammals. Just as I reached the register I heard "So when they gave him the DWI they impounded his horse."
As it turns out -- and I lingered near the gum in order to hear the rest of this story -- the girl behind me, a local girl I'm guessing, had a boyfriend who rode his horse to a bar last week, got drunk, and then passed out on his horse while he was riding home. Apparently that's a DWI (I would have called it reckless endangerment of the horse) and so they gave him a ticket and impounded the horse as evidence.
His court date, at which time he can pay to have the horse released back into his custody, is on Wednesday. Yeah.
Anyhow, we've made it this far and just came back from the restaurant attached to the hotel, which does a shockingly good chicken-fried-steak with biscuits. And now, fed and exhausted, I'm going to go turn on the television and fall asleep. I hope all is well out there in LJ-land.
Seriously, this town makes no bones about existing specifically for people to stop at on road trips. There are no less than twenty-one hotels of varying degrees of poshness, ten restaurants (no fast food, no Starbuckses*, only one bar) and two thousand residents.
* Isn't it illegal for any settlement larger than fifty not to have a Starbucks? I'm sure it's in the Bux Bylaws.
The teacher in me says that the place is screaming for a community theatre, but the cynic in me says that if people were really that interested in the arts, well, they wouldn't live HERE.
Anyhow, the trip was relatively quiet. We got underway about eight am after a little under an hour of packing; I feel that although I still have the same number of boxes as always, I'm proud of the fact that now all my belongings fit in a space five by ten by four instead of five by ten by ten. It's not exactly spartan, but it's certainly not like some of the trucks we saw on the road today. One full-sized moving van still couldn't hold this family's entire belongings, so they strapped a kiddie sandbox and a wheelbarrow to the back. Oy.
We didn't see much of anything of note for, oh, EVER, except for the remains of a very fatal looking two-truck head-on collision. We just...drove. I had thought about reading or working on the laptop or something, but after all the loading and cleaning and stress of the morning, I ended up staring at the landscape for several hours. It was about all the input I could handle.
We did have lunch in a romantic comedy, which was pretty funny.
Actually it was an Applebee's restaurant, but we ended up sitting just next to a group straight out of a Sandra Bullock family film. There were the grandparents, the two sons, the older son's wife, the three grandkids, and the girl that the older son's wife had clearly set up with the younger son, who was HAVING NONE OF IT. It cracked me up. Lucky asked why I was so quiet and I said I was watching the movie An Applebee's To Remember.
After lunch we stopped for gas and I ran in to buy some cold water bottles for the road. I was standing in line behind an elderly couple who were blowing their life savings on lottery tickets when I had a Lewis Black moment. In one of his stand-up routines, Lewis Black talks about overhearing something so ridiculous and bizarre that it might kill you if you thought about it too hard. Oddly, both his example ("If it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college") and mine both involve hoofed mammals. Just as I reached the register I heard "So when they gave him the DWI they impounded his horse."
As it turns out -- and I lingered near the gum in order to hear the rest of this story -- the girl behind me, a local girl I'm guessing, had a boyfriend who rode his horse to a bar last week, got drunk, and then passed out on his horse while he was riding home. Apparently that's a DWI (I would have called it reckless endangerment of the horse) and so they gave him a ticket and impounded the horse as evidence.
His court date, at which time he can pay to have the horse released back into his custody, is on Wednesday. Yeah.
Anyhow, we've made it this far and just came back from the restaurant attached to the hotel, which does a shockingly good chicken-fried-steak with biscuits. And now, fed and exhausted, I'm going to go turn on the television and fall asleep. I hope all is well out there in LJ-land.
