Janice M Cali
Vacations - Sane or unsane?
Traveling Can Make You Crazy
I love to travel, anywhere, anytime, with anyone. Now, that's going to far, not with anyone, but with Jerry, yeah, he's good to travel with, for many reasons, one he's a good driver, two he understands silence, my talking, my thought processes and he's extremely well educated, has great ideas about lots of things and is fun to listen to, always (almost).
As luck would have it about two years ago I achieved a dream. I've wanted a Volvo for years, they are safe, strong, and reliable. I love 'em. And I finally got one, it was nine years old when I bought it, needed a bunch of work, but only had 86,000 miles on it. After dropping more money into it than I wanted, it is now running perfectly (no jinks please), and is the most comfortable car I've ever had or have ever ridden in, except for Wanda's new/old Lincoln, of which she is ashamed, gas hog you know.
Anyway, Saturday, Jerry and I were due to head out on a five day vacation to visit our friend Wanda who lives in South Central Texas, we live in the far North East of Texas. We live the Piney Woods, as they are called, Sequin, where Wanda moved to, is not in the Piney Woods, nor the hills nor the desert, it is somewhere in between. It's hot, pretty and at the same time too crowded for my taste. It, the town, only has 25,000 people, but that is far to many for my taste, I don't like crowds anymore. I like the country which is where I now live, the town, mine has about 1800 people, and is too big.
Whoops, got off subject. As I was saying, Jerry and I were due to leave Saturday about 3:00 in the afternoon for an eight hour drive, with stops. Jerry works a job that fluctuates, time wise. He was supposed to work 10:00 to 3:00, but his supervisor, Bambi (honest, blond and everything,, no offense to the smart blonds out there) who makes lots of mistakes, one of which was to schedule two jobs for Jerry at the same time. Jerry does demonstrations of different products in large stores like K-Mart, and you are only supposed to do one demonstration a day. Bambi, bless her dumb little head, scheduled two for Jerry on a day we were going to leave and he did them, because if he didn't he would get written up. And to think he's retired, yeah right, the economy,don't you know.
So, what time did Jerry get off? Well, he finished the demos about 6:30, had to clean up his station, put supplies away, and then decided we should have a new cooler, so went and bought one. He got out of the store about, well we hit the road at 7:30, only about three hours later than we planned. I was thrilled, can you just imagine? I hope I never get to meet Bambi, she might suffer, only verbal pain, inflicted by me.
Getting on the road three hours late was a draw back, I was driving, and I don't like to drive in the dark, but Jerry was, obviously tired, he needed to rest. So I drove, most of the way. We had to get gas, so we stopped about 30 minutes out, the drove for two hours until we reached the large, not really, town of Malakoff, Texas. Why did we stop so soon? Because Jerry had a report he had to file, on-line, for Bambi or he wouldn't get paid for the time he'd just put in, right not get paid for all those hours on his feet?
In Malakoff we found a McDonald's Internet Cafe, yes, McDonald's now has Internet cafes around the country and the number is growing. They charge for the time used, or you can buy a membership, no really, you can. Jerry chose to buy two hours for $2.95, via credit card. It didn't work, he called support, they couldn't make it work, so they gave him the time free. Cool! One really good thing happened. But this short stop to file a 15 minute report took over an hour. It was now going on 11:00, yes at night, and we had at least three or four hours ahead of us, or so we thought.
Traffic was light, the roads are good, although we didn't travel interstate for the first part of the trip, I don't like them either, too much traffic and crazy people. Not unsane, but completely crazy, people driving pickup trucks who think their driving race cars, 18 wheelers who race each other, until someone spots a state trooper then suddenly everyone is doing the speed limit, behaving themselves, all that, except for the idiots who think they are invincible, I hate them the most.
When we finally reached the interstate I was surprised to find that there was almost no traffic, at times we were the only car in sight, going south, north had traffic. That was fine with me, new highway, good car, good companionship, not bad after all.
Somewhere around midnight both Jerry and I decided that we wanted something hot to eat. We had lots of good food in the car, but we wanted hot. I decided to top off the gas tank for a couple of reasons, one being I wasn't sure how much further we had to go, and second I did know that as we got south of Austin the gas stations closed between 1:00 and 2:00 and we were going to be hitting that area about them. Getting gas seemed like a sound and good idea. Luckily the gas stations on the interstates usually have restaurants, or subways, or something good like that and so did this one, but theirs was closed, only their prepared foods were available. Things like, hold on here, sausage on a stick, BBQ sandwiches, Taco Burgers, burritos, and thank goodness, egg rolls, everyone knows it's hard to ruin a prepackaged egg roll, right?!
We bought, one sausage on a stick, for Jerry, a BBQ sandwich for me, mistake, and two egg rolls. Jerry declared the sausage not bad, I should have had one. I declared the BBQ sandwich almost inedible. We saved the egg rolls.
Somewhere before Austin it started raining, and I will not drive in the rain at night. I won't do it. I had a very bad accident in those circumstances and I still fear it. Long story, but a drunk driver came into my lane on a two lane bridge, nightmares happen.
The last time I had made this trip, Jerry had driven most of the first part of the trip and I'd taken over about Waco because he was almost asleep at the wheel, I got to drive through Austin, traffic jam at 1:30 in the morning, honestly I don't understand big cities anymore, why? Why do people live like that?
This time Jerry got to drive through Austin, he had rain, not bad, and idiots who thought they could fly to the liquor store before it closed. Mostly they were wrong, but what the hell, they didn't manage to kill anyone this time, but who knows about next time. See why i don't like to drive at night in the rain? Some people don't realize, care or whatever, that driving conditions do have some affect on how they should drive. Idiots all.
We had to get off about 50 miles south of Austin, at San Marcos, I know you don't know where that is and don't really care. Well it is about 20 miles from where we were heading. Thank God! I took over again, the rain wasn't to bad and Jerry was showing signs of being very tired. He fell asleep shortly after I took over.
Finally we arrived in Sequin, got to Wanda's, called her on the phone from her driveway, as I'd told her to go to bed, we'd wake her when we arrived, which we obviously did, got inside, sat down on the couch, well laid down, and were handed a drink, God bless Wanda, Scotch, a single malt, aged to perfection. Vacation finally started. We drank and talked until around 5:30. Life was good again, and remains so. It's a lovely little town with an Internet cafe and nice scenery, nice friendly people but mostly Wanda and her critters and no worries until Thursday when we have to be home again.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention the egg rolls, you can ruin egg rolls, even precooked, packaged, and prepared egg rolls, cook them in rancid oil, serve them stale and then make the mistake of trying to eat them. Don't ever do this, it is a bad thing. Really.
