Well . . .

I know. I know. Such a deep thought for such a shallow mind.

I was going to write about my trip to Austin last night, but the digital cable service went out right in the middle of typing up that post so here I am writing it now instead.

As I mentioned in another post, I was going to Austin to stay with friends because I thought I had to be in Austin on Monday for some training. I found out later that I wasn’t needed in Austin until Thursday, but it was too late to change plans by then. Anyway, the Prodigal Son was going to his sister’s in Fort Worth along with five cats, his girlfriend, and his best friend.

The trip to Austin from my house should take about four (4) hours. The trip to Fort Worth should take about six (6). There are a couple of routes you can take to get to either city, but they generally don’t add more than an extra hour or so to the trip.

I had to go to work on Wednesday, so by the time I got home and got everything packed and made sure the Prodigal Son had himself and the cats all squared away, it was a little after 4 pm when I got on the road. The Prodigal Son started his trip about half an hour after I left because it took just a bit longer to get things fitted in his car.

Sometime between seven (7) and nine (9) hours into the trip, I pulled off the Sam Houston Tollway to take a personal hygiene break and top off my gas tank. I honestly don’t remember exactly when I pulled off or where, but the line for the bathroom – don’t get me started on the condition it was in – was longer than the line for gasoline.

At about 13 ½ hours into the trip, I pulled off Highway 290 – I think it might have been at Barker-Cypress – for another hygiene break. I stopped at a Randall’s supermarket and wound up napping in their parking lot for about an hour while I waited for the store to open. I don’t know what woke me, but I felt slightly better having napped a bit.

About 20 hours into the trip, in some little town whose name I don’t know and whose name I can’t even look up because I honestly have no idea where I was, I stopped to get something to eat and deal with the hygiene thing again. The restaurant billed itself as a steakhouse, but I think it might have been exaggerating just a bit. I ordered what the menu called a half pound ground sirloin steak with brown gravy that wound up being a processed hamburger patty – like the kind you get at fast food burger places – and some kind of liquid that was almost but not quite brown but did taste like gravy. I ordered string beans and carrots as my vegetables of choice and they were actually pretty good.

Just a little bit up the street from the restaurant, I stopped at a gas station to top off my tank again. I tried calling the Prodigal Son while I pumped gas, but I must have been in a cell phone dead zone because it kept telling me the call couldn’t be completed. The last time I’d talked to him, which was several hours earlier, he was just about to arrive in Waco and he was thinking about pulling off the road there to get a couple hours of sleep.

At 23 hours into the trip, I finally reached the Prodigal on the phone and he’d made it to his sister’s house. He couldn’t remember exactly when he’d gotten there, but he thought it had taken him about 17 or 18 hours.

At 26 ½ hours, I finally reached the front door of my friends’ house. They led me in. They fed me. They unpacked my car. They showed me where to shower. They showed me where to sleep.

And I had a wonderful time while I was there. I read some. I worked on the butterfly fairy and the scarf. I watched the news about the hurricane. On Saturday, the Missus Friend and I went to a small craft shop and dug around cross stitch patterns and yarns and doodads. It turned out to be a really relaxing little vacation.

Late Saturday afternoon the Prodigal called to say they’d already started the trek home but that they’d just gotten done rafting down the Guadalupe River and were stopped in New Braunfels. I found out after I got home that another friend of his had evacuated to New Braunfels to be with family and they stopped by to visit her. They left the cats at her house while they played on the river which was shallow enough in parts that people’s bottoms scraped on rocks.

I started my trek home about 11 am on Sunday. Other a few pockets where everyone felt the need to drive 20 miles below the speed limit for no reason I could discern, the drive back was a breeze. I arrived at my front door at just a few minutes after 3 pm.