Mammoth Goes to Eite Site...and Returns

 Tuesday 5/17

More of the same, except my morning jog was interrupted by a sprinkle of rain. I gave up too easily and went up the hill to play on the Internet. Planning more trips.....

In the late afternoon we went to town to eat with Bill and Pam at Longhorn Steakhouse. The food was probably pretty good, but pretty dismal for a vegetarian trying to watch their consumption. I forgot to ask for my salad dressing on the side, so I had a bowl of romaine lettuce and red cabbage drenched in viniagrette. Soppingly, soddenly drenched. On top they'd sprinkled exactly two slivers of mandarin orange, four grapes, a tablespoon of feta cheese (which I don't even like), a teaspoon of pecans, and two sliced strawberries. All this cost $10. But I wasn't paying.

For a side I had roasted brussels sprouts, which were yummy....for the first two bites. After that they just tasted sweet and fattening.  I guess I'm impossible to please these days.

And that's pretty much all for the day. But tomorrow we go home!

Birds for Arkansas: summer tanager again, pee-wee, fish crow, robin, indigo bunting, some annoying warbler like bird I couldn't get a good look at, and nuthatch.


Wednesday 5/18

We left late and it was 5:21 before I sat down to write the ending to this story. It wasn't our fault we left late--we were just finished with breakfast and making motions to go when the fifth member of our company, the chef de' cuisine extraodinaire, finished with her crisis management phone call and joined us.  So we were stuck for another twenty minutes.

We had to do two gas stops, too. I mean, we didn't have to do two, but we preferred to arrive at home with a full tank and ready to go. It made more sense then getting out a few days later to fill up and wasting the extra gas to go the 16 miles roundtrip to the Love's Travel Stop in Anna, when we were coming right by it on the way home.

The entire trip took 6 hours and 23 minutes, which was too dang long.

Note for the notes: figure out a route that avoids Sherman for the next year or so. Especially if going northbound. Going southbound like we were, there were no backups to speak of but the road construction was horrifying and the potholes, ditches, bumps and boulders were impossible to avoid. So, in future, just no. Not that route.

We'll go through Paris if we must, but I think there's a route on 121 through Bonham that won't be too far out of our way. And no matter how bad it is, it won't be worse.