Wendy's Wonderings

Dear Peter,

Well, here are the details of day number 2 of our vacation. For the “cliff notes” version I encourage you to read “Cleggy’s” blog at the “White Horse”. :-) Wish I had written those instead. :-)

Ok, so the second day we woke up around 6:00 and got dressed. We put our things together, and ate a so-so continental breakfast at the hotel. We checked out and were on our way at about 8:00 am. I believe it was that day that dear nephew learned to sing “Witchdoctor”. :-)

In no time at all we were in Gainesville. We saw a sign for an outlet store and decided to check it out. It looked pretty cool, but did not open until 10:00 am. They had a huge pond out front, with lots of ducks. It was such a pretty sight that I had to “break in” my camera by taking some pictures. After all, I had a gig scan disk in the camera. It wasn’t like I was wasting film. :-)

It seemed that as soon as I opened my door the “northern” that we had been hearing about decided to hit. The wind was blowing so hard I had trouble putting my sweater, and it felt like the temperature dropped 30 degrees in a matter minutes, literally. I got my pictures, and we decided to drive around the historic downtown area and wait for the mall to open. I remembered that there was a neat train museum, and interesting courthouse/town square to occupy our time.

Turned out we picked the wrong weekend for that. The very next day they were having a “celebration of the depot”, so the museum was closed to prepare for the day. We decided to drive around and sightsee. It was really neat. Lots of big old houses, neat courthouse, lots of old businesses… We even found a pharmacy with an old fashioned soda fountain inside. We decided to wait for it to open. Dave and I got out and walked around the square “window shopping” and taking pictures. I am sure people looked at us and thought “hmph… tourist”, but I didn’t care. :-)

The pharmacy opened and we went inside. It was worth the wait. This place had the old counter, bar stools, Coke memorabilia, and old draft machine, 45s hanging on the wall, etc… It was cool!! We decided to order “dreamcicles”. Vanilla ice cream with orange soda. They were good. :-) Then, we were off to the mall.

Our first stop was the information center where we got a map of all of the stores in the “mall”. We immediately decided on 4 stores we wanted to go to. Turns out 2 of them had closed down, one being the toy store that the nephew desperately wanted to go to, and the other being the Bible store he desperately wanted to go to. Guess it was not his day. We went to the last two stores that did exist, and did a little shopping. It was disappointing, but it was a nice mall, and we had nice, cool weather to walk in.

Back in the car, more singing and laughing, we stopped at a Dairy Queen for lunch. We then made our way into Wichita Falls. Let me interject here how much MapQuest sucks!! The hotel was no where near the directions they gave. Thank God for cell phones! After calling the hotel for directions we arrive at the hotel in about 15 minutes. Good news, the hotel is in the same parking lot as a mall! :-) We decide to go into said mall and look around. We go into a couple of stores, look over the directory to locate a toy store. Finding none we head on to the hotel to check in, only to discover that directly behind our hotel is a Toys R Us. The nephew is bouncing off the walls at this point. Unfortunately, he was down to about $10 left of the days “spending allowance”. I make a deal with him later, and he does get to go to Toys R Us, so for those of you who were disappointed for him, don’t be too upset. :-)

We check into the hotel, eat at Denny’s, and head in for the night. Other than the hotel beds being too small, it was much better than the hotel the night before. We all rest pretty well, and David and I both enjoyed playing the Deal or No Deal game he bought at Toys R Us. :-) So, the day was very relaxing, fun (you just had to be in the car to experience and hear that stuff) :-) and “uneventful”. But we loved it.

More next time
Sincerely,
Wendy Darling… “Ooh, eeh, ooh, ah, ah, ting tang walla-walla bing bang”…..:-)