Our Trip Down

We pulled out just a few minutes after 5:00am, mom was a little late. Yesterday she tried to smooth down one of the ridges on the driveway, sunk very deep into the ever present mud, was barely able to get the car out and then on the drive into Peoria the car would vibrate terribly if she drove more than 50 miles an hour. Ruth is going to take it to Riekers on Monday to get the rocks out of the tires. What is my 77, almost 78 year old mother doing trying to flatten a driveway with her Buick Ultra.
The drive down was smooth and easy, no problems at all and we arrived at Lani Kai 129 right at 7:36pm. Our projected time was 7:30 so we were only 6 minutes late. We stopped at a Waffle House for breakfast around 10:30am and that was what put us a back a few minutes. My children don’t like to stop and eat and mom and I felt very extravagant taking the 20 minutes for a breakfast on china.
We were very pleasantly surprised once in the condo at all the food the Koch’s left us. There were 4 different kinds of ice cream and we each had a small bowl before bed. There were also cookies, cheese, milk, and bread so no grocery shopping for a few days. Mom looked everything over, tried to get the rust off one of the bathroom sinks, kept announcing how much she liked her condo compared to this one and then decided that hers must NEVER be sold.
The time change is this weekend. We changed our watches but there are no clocks in the condo and were both in bed by 10:30pm the new time. It felt so wonderful to get horizontal.
Sunday Morning:
Up at 7:00am to watch the sunrise which can’t be seen very well from this condo, then after a leisurely 2 cups of coffee later our walk down the beach carrying Wal-mart bags for garbage. There is not a lot of garbage on the beach but mom feels it is her job to make sure the entire place is in the best possible condition before Eva Jean and Marilyn get here on Monday. Really she just likes to clean the beach.
We made breakfast of eggs, sausage, whole grain toast, blackberry jam, juice and coffee, then listened in to the Peoria church service. By the time that was over we decided to drive down to Orange Beach for an art show but mom forgot to get the address so we didn’t find the show. We put on our suits and headed over to the pool for some reading, sun and nap time. As we headed up the stairs we realized that the renters in mom’s condo had left so broke in, tried to get on Internet but no go, went through the owners closet for supplies, then back into our own condo. Two more times during the day we thought of things we could use so went back inside moms to get them.
Dinner was a chicken breast poached in white wine then browned in olive oil on a pita bread with shredded Cheddar cheese and a few nuts mixed in. It was very tasty. We ate some left over cherry cheesecake ice cream for dessert then decided to watch the Tommie Turvey video. We could not figure out how to get any of the dvd players in this condo to work so decided to go over to mom’s condo to watch it. As we opened up the door we noticed the lights on and commented we don’t remember leaving the lights on when we realized the cleaners were there getting the condo ready for the guest coming in tomorrow.
We remembered that my laptop plays videos and finally got to watch Tommie on that. The sun was going down when mom decided she wanted to drive down to the lagoon to watch the sunset but the roads are crowded and we didn’t make it in time but still a nice drive seeing all the new houses and high rises along the beach. Once back the cleaners were gone so in we went to check out their job and the condo looked and smelled very nice except mom noticed the porch table had not been cleaned so into the owners closet again for the cleaning supplies and back to work she went.