Our RV Adventures

Well, today was our first day off in 5 weeks and boy, are we tired.

Our relief guard, Charlotte, showed up about 9am, right on schedule, even though I kind of gave her bad directions on how to get here. But that wasn’t really my fault either.

I told her to come 2 miles down the road and then turn in where she saw two oil rigs. But what I didn’t know was that since I went into town last Thursday, one of the rigs had packed up and left town. Nobody told me.

After Jan and I showed Charlotte where everything was, and the logging requirements here on our gate, we headed out . . . in the wrong direction. Rather than leaving, we first drove further into our gate area to get a better idea where all the different sites are located (we got six more pads back there). We’ve been giving guys directions to sites back in there, but pretty much based on hearsay, not having really seen the layout. So this was a good chance to do it.

Finally reversing course, we headed back out our gate and over to Bryan/College Station for the day. Our first stop was IHOP to grab a quick bit of breakfast, but the ‘quick’ bit was out. They were very crowded with a 30+ minute wait. I’ve seen this plenty of times on Sunday morning, but never a Saturday.

After deciding we didn’t want to spend any of our short time off waiting on a table, we moved down the road to a close-by Jack in the Box for what turned out to be really good breakfast burritos.

Our next stop was a nearby Great Clips so Jan could get her hair cut. And as usual while on a gate, she got it cut kind of short so she won’t have to worry about it for a while. For my part, I got in a nice nap in the car while I was waiting for her.

Naps are nice.

With that taken care, we stopped off right next door at a Kroger’s to get some bread and butter pickles that they carry. It’s a Kroger house-brand that Jan really likes, so we stocked up with several jars. We also picked up some Cranberry Orange and Lemon Poppy Seed muffins to have for breakfast the next few days. Yumm!

With that taken care of, we headed further south on Hwy 6 to the Sam’s Club to pick up Jan’s prescriptions and a few other things. Leaving the store, I filled up the truck at the Sam’s gas station and was pleasantly surprised to find unleaded for $2.95 a gallon. Well, as pleasantly surprised as you can be paying almost $3 a gallon, since I remember being able to fill the 10 gallon tank in my 1965 Triumph Spitfire for $2.50, or even $1.50 if there was a gas war going on.

By the time we finished up with all this, it was about 12:15, and since we planned on making a 1pm showing of ‘Guardians of the Galaxy ‘, we headed over in that direction, which happened to be right down the street from the Kroger’s we just left earlier. Oh, well.

“Guardians of the Galaxy” is the latest from the Marvel comic book universe, and one I wasn’t familiar with, since it didn’t first come out until1969, a few years after I put comics aside.

I discovered girls. And girls were better than comics.

Much better.

But I digress. Back in the late 50’s – early 60’s I was really into comic books. The first ones were from the DC comic world, i.e. Superman, Batman, Flash, and Green Lantern, etc.  But then in the early 60’s new comics started appearing in the rotating racks in Wright’s Drugs and Stacey’s Drugs in Foley, AL.

These were Marvel comics, with titles like Fantastic Four, Spiderman, Hulk, Iron Man, X-Men, Thor, Doctor Strange, Captain American, and the Silver Surfer. Names that people know today from the movies, but I remember when they first appeared in print.

One of the things different about Marvel heroes was that they had problems. Not problems like how to defeat the undefeatable villain in this month’s issue. But real-world kind of problems, too. And flaws.

Peter Parker, Spiderman’s teenaged alter ego, couldn’t get a date for the prom. Iron Man had a heart condition, Matt Murdock, the Daredevil, was blind, and the teams, like the Fantastic Four, X-Men, Avengers, etc., fought among themselves almost as much as they battled the latest bad guy. They had angst, and lots of it.

But the really sad part to this story is that I owned all of these first issues of Marvel comics. I bought every one with my lawnmowing business money and my shoeshine income at the local barbershop.

I owned Amazing Fantasy #15, the first appearance of Spiderman. I held it in my hands.

And in 2011 a copy sold at auction for $1.1 million.

Of course a copy of the first Superman comic recently sold for over $3.2 million. But it came out in 1938, a little before my time.

Other Marvel first appearance comics from that era sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I owned them all. So why aren’t we rich? Why don’t we buy a new Prevost every year, just because?

When I went off to college in the fall of 1966, my mother cleaned out my closet and threw them all away.

SOB!

Oh, well. Back to the movie.

It was really good. OK, OK. A little more.

Since this was basically an ‘origins’ movie, they had to take some time to set things up, give you some ideas about the characters and their backgrounds. But once the action started, it was pretty much nonstop. In fact RunPee, the app that tells you the best places in a movie to take a bathroom break, said there are no good places in Guardians, just some that aren’t as bad as others.

If anything, I enjoyed the movie more because I didn’t know anything about the storyline. The movie has a lot of twists and turns, and you’re not always sure who the bad guy is at any one time.

Summing up, a lot of humor, a lot of action, and a plot reveal at end that probably sets up the next movie. And there will be next one. This one made too much money.

And hey, any movie with Glenn Close in it has to be good.

Getting out of the movie about 3:30 we decided to have an early dinner at the Cotton Patch Café. We’d heard it advertised on the radio and decided to give it a try. And it turned out to be very good.

Kind of close between Black-Eyed Pea and Cheddars, it’s a comfort food sort of place. Jan had the Chicken Fried Chicken and I had the Pot Roast with carrots and potatoes. Both excellent, and large enough portions that we had plenty to bring home for supper tomorrow night. And that left room for Jan and I to share a piece of their delicious Coconut Cream Pie.

With our tummy’s full, now was the time to go grocery shopping at Wal-Mart. Cuts down on those impulse, I’m starving, I need this 5lb. bag of potato chips, kind of purchases.

Finally heading home about 6pm we had enough time to stop at the big gas station/ convenience store in North Zulch. We’d noticed before that, like the Exxon station down in Whitsett we patronized the last two years, this one too had fried chicken, many types of burritos and tacos, pizzas, and a lot more. And they keep it fresh 24 hours a day, because they get round-the-clock business from all the rigs around here. Otherwise the nearest hot food/supplies are 15 to 25 miles away, depending on which way you good.

Jan was talking to the young lady who runs the food counter and mentioned we were gate guards and just want to check out their selection for later. She ask where we were located, and when I told her, it turns out she lives on our road. Jan gave her our sympathy, with all the trucks going in and out.

Getting home, we unloaded everything and sent Charlotte on her way. She did a great job working our gate, and took real good care of things. In fact we have a tentative date for her to work our gate again on Oct 25th, Jan’s birthday. Hopefully it’ll work out.

We (especially Jan) really enjoyed our day off, but both agreed it would be kind of good to be back on the gate just to rest up.

Goofing off for the day can be tiring.

________________________________________________________________

Thought for the Day:

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” – George Orwell

dadsfadsf