Weekend of July 11-13, 2008

This is the weekend that our friends Rick and Brenda Taube come back to Houston. We left the trailer at Rayford so we could be there when they returned. We drove up Friday night and met Harry and Judy, who are staying in the park for the month of July and of course Ricky and Dee who are living there. We all went to Hooters Friday night for hot wings and beer. There were some girls representing Miller that were handing out free Miller Chill beer. It's a beer with lime that comes in an aluminum can shaped like a tall boy. The can seems to be real cold but the beer inside it isn't all that cold and none of us were impressed with it. It was great because it was free, but I probably wouldn't buy it, but I'm not that much of a beer drinker anyway. We went back to the park and all got in the hot tub and pool. It's so relaxing and we all slept like babies.

Saturday morning, Harry and Judy had to go to Texarkana to a funeral. We just sat around the trailer most of the day. I went to the office and tried to decide which space we want to reserve for next year in October when we return from our first month on the road after retirement. All of the end spaces are available and we will probably end up in space #94. This is starting to get exciting, making plans for being retired and living in the trailer. We're going to Blue Spruce RV park in Colorado for the month of September or until it starts to snow, then down to Albuquerque New Mexico for the baloon festival and then back to Rayford sometime around the 10th of October.

Ricky washed his truck and parts of his trailer and got through around noon. He came over and wanted to go somewhere to eat lunch. We decided to barbecue some chickens tonight so after eating at the Tai Pei restaurant, we stopped off at Kroger and picked up the chicken and other items for tonight. We invited Jim and Sheila Gratz over to eat with us. He is retired from the Houston Police Dept. after 28 years. They travel a lot but maintain their home in Trinity. They are friends from the Heartland club and have one of the older Landmark trailers.

Sunday morning we drank our coffee and Rick and Brenda came over about 9 o'clock after Mass. We went to the Forest Cafe in the Woodlands for breakfast. We rode over to the Timber Ridge Village, the new park Gwen and Billy recently bought and looked around. They have improved the park a lot, but Rick's little car scraped on the speed bumps. They came back to the trailer and we visited with them 'til about 2. They still have some relatives to go see while they're here. They made a flying trip in from Memphis where Rick is working with his brother. They were supposed to have stayed at Ted and Donna's house but when they got there the air conditioner was out and couldn't be fixed this weekend. They ended up going to the extended stay hotel but will have to leave on Friday. Rick spoke with Donna this morning to tell her about the a/c problems. She wasn't happy to know that they will be coming home to a hot house with no air conditioning. They also suffered another blowout on their trailer but Goodyear is replacing all their tires at no cost. They still have some body damage on the trailer to get fixed in Lufkin.

We returned home about 4 o'clock and after Stella cut the grass in the back yard (I had already cut the front yard earlier in the week) we went down and took the boys to Uncle Chan's restaurant in Texas City for supper.

A nice ending to the weekend.