I’ve been a blog slacker for a while now. Work and school were interfering, but i need to get back to it, and catch the bug again. On to the story….

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Spent this past weekend in Austin, TX. My wife and I ended up going because my 83 year old mother-in-law was planning to drive herself from Houston to Austin. In the name of public safety, the wife unit and I offered to drive her. Needless to say, her vision makes driving something like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. The primary reason for the trip was a memorial for my sister-in-law’s ex-husband who passed away recently. The get together was a bunch of family, friend’s of his and the family, and a motorcycle club who had nothing to do with the memorial. Oh, and on Saturday there was also a BD party for our great nephew. Nothing like a multi-purpose party to bring people together (the keg and free food didn’t hurt either).

My wife had an interesting time in the car with us. My hearing isn’t so hot and neither is my mother-in-law’s (MIL), so she ends up translating for us back and forth. When she doesn’t, the results are rather entertaining. Once the MIL was saying she was having trouble breathing, I thought I heard her say she was having trouble reading, so I turned on the overhead light in the car. On this trip, the MIL was directing from the backseat (she actually does pretty good as a navigator) when the traffic light ahead started to turn yellow. She thought a car going to turn in front of us and was shouting “No, no, no!”, but I heard “Go, go, go!” and raced through the intersection (no crashes). It was good for a laugh after the fact…

The drive home only had one funny story. Has anyone ever been to Giddings, TX? It’s a quaint little town on Highway 290. It used to be the place where cell phones cut out on the drive to Austin, now it’s a place to get gas or get caught speeding (speed limit drops from 70 to 30 as you go into town). Well, my MIL was swearing there was this place where we could stop for lunch and get gas. All I knew is that it was good last time she was there, and it was on the right (I never was clear if that was going east or west). We kept driving through town and started to get to the end of the town. She swore that the yellowish building on the left was it…..That was a Bucee’s known for gas and other great items that you would normally only find in a Cracker Barrel Restaurant. I assured her we didn’t want to eat the hot dogs that had been cooking for the past 16 weeks because the Pepcid was packed. I took a right at drove up to Subway. After lunch we did go to Bucee’s and got gas for a whopping $2.39/gal (I wish someone could explain why gas is cheaper out in the boonies). Now Bucee’s has all sorts of thing in addition to the standard 7-11 merchandise: apple butter, cinnamon sugar coated almonds, sweet potato butter, and the list goes on….

The rest of the drive home was smooth sailing, no tickets, no slowpokes, no rain, and lots of bugs on the grill. Oh yeah we did crosswords in the car and my wife read me summaries of Newsweek and Harvard Business Review articles. It was a fun weekend….

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