The busiest travel day of the year

I'm sorry that more of you didn't like the story about the drunk Tom Cruise guy I posted over the weekend. Anyway, I'm going to be very busy today and I don't have time to come up with anything brilliant. So I'm going to transfer an old post from the other blog. I think from now on, I will just post the rest of those in chronological order, instead of trying to find something relevent to something someone else posted.

(the following was originally posted on another blog on November 23rd)

Yesterday was the busiest travel day of the year.

Well, that's what the day before Thanksgiving is supposed to be. But I hardly ever travel on that day, because most of my family lives here. In fact, when I was little, one set of grandparents lived an hour away, and the other set lived about two or three hours away, so that we did our traveling on the holiday itself and didn't have to deal with any traffic at all.

But after my husband got a job that involved a lot of travel (mostly in Texas), I did have to deal with the dreaded Wednesday before traffic a couple of times. And yesterday was one of those times. But yesterday's traffic wasn't bad at all, at least where we were.

So Monday we had to drive a few hours away, to the place I spent the first eleven years of my life. There's nothing to do there. It is quite boring. Next month, there will be Christmas lights to look at, but this week, nothing.

Still, I went anyway, to spend a little time with my husband. We drove by my old house. The people who live there now are really into the spirit of things and already have a lot of Christmas decorations up. The two front yard trees are gone now. I wanted to look in the back yard and see if the plum tree was still there and if the storm shelter was made good use of, but I didn't look. Nor did I look in the backyard of the house across the street to see if the Fort was still there. I think it was, maybe I just couldn't see it because it was painted a different color.

We had lunch at The Glass Kitchen, the world's only drive-thru where you can actually understand what is being said because you talk to a real person instead of a microphone. It has never made sense to me why everyone does not have this same design. It wasn't quite as good as I remembered from my last stop in town (I should have asked for a chili-cheeseburger, but those are so messy), and I'm always surprised how small it looks. When I was a kid it seemed like a really big square building, like a Walmart, but no, it's just a little hamburger stand.

After working only two days, we headed home, and stopped at a small town that we used to spend a lot of time at about ten years ago. The Walmart my husband did business from was closed, replaced by a Supercenter outside of town. A Taco Bell/KFC had been added, but it was closed for renovations. More of the little shops on Main street had closed down, and very few of those remaining where open yesterday. We stopped at the soda fountain, and were told that the two old antique dealers from next door finally moved to California, and they both died soon after.

Not much to do there either, so after I finished my ice cream we got going again. There was hardly any traffic until we were almost home. We got to I-35, and there was the traffic waiting for us. Only I couldn't tell that much of it was really from out-of-town travelers. At some point we thought, lets just go ahead and get off at this exit and do a little shopping. And there everyone was, going to the mall. We didn't actually go to the mall, but a shopping center nearby. We mostly just looked at a few things and stopped for lunch.

So it was not a bad day before Thanksgiving, but it wasn't a really fun day off either. Now I'm off to decide which movie to see after we eat, then plan out tomorrow's shopping.

Happy Thanksgiving