We Can't Seem to Stay Put!

Tucson, AZ
Dec. 15, 2005
Season's Greetings to all!!!

Well, here we go again! We went to see our Grandson in San Antonio...What a fun trip! We took Amtrak from Tucson to San Antonio. Now, that was an experience! First of all, the train was 5 hours late getting into Tucson; it was suppose to arrive at 2:20 ahoy; however we spent 5 long, hard hours on very hard benches in the train depot until it finally arrived at 7:20 a.m. We could have gotten a good nights sleep and still made the train had we known it was that late! At any rate, finally on the train; very tired, but still rarin' to go! We get to 12 miles west of Lordsburg, NM (for those of you who don't know where wonderful Lordsburg is, you haven't missed anything! It is in the middle of NOWHERE!) All of a sudden, the train comes to a grinding halt, with the announcement that the crew has ran out of running time. Apparently the crew can only operate the train for 12 hours at a time and they had officially ran out of time! Okay, so this is nice, we are really in the middle of nowhere...and no train crew! The new crew was coming out of El Paso, and they weren't there yet. We waited for almost 2 hours for the new crew to arrive, and finally we were on our way again. We arrived in San Antonio 8 hours late...I think this may be a new record for Amtrak! At any rate, we finally got our rental car and found our hotel and took a nice, long nap!
Danny arrived around 5:oo p.m. and we were sure happy to see him. He has grown up into a very nice, responsible young man and we are proud of him. We went to dinner and then he took us to a movie..we saw "Rent"...if you haven't seen it, go! It was really good.
The next day dawned a bit cloudy and cool, so we spent the morning shopping and then went downtown to the RiverCenter and took a boat ride on the river that goes through San Antonio. Very nice and we spent some time on the River Walk as well.
Sunday was rainy/misty and cool, but we went to the Alamo anyway. Very interesting place, filled with a lot of history. After that we decided to drive to Buda, Texas to the Cabelas store. Al wanted to nose around and Danny was amazed at how big it was! We stopped on the way back at the largest outlet mall I have ever seen! I just had to do some retail therapy there! If you are ever in or near San Marcos, TX, stop at this place...it has everything.
Monday, Danny had to work. He is in the Army and is getting ready to ship out to Germany for 2 years, but currently at Ft. Sam Houston. He is a medic and has just finished his training for optometry technician. We spent the day nosing around and then met up with Danny for dinner at Joe's Crab Shack. We said our goodbyes to him that evening and got ready to brave Amtrak again in the morning. We were scheduled to leave at 5:40 a.m., but of course, we all know how that works. We were very surprised to arrive at the station and find the train already there! We got on and went to sleep even before it left. We had a fairly uneventful trip home, only arriving 4 hours late.

NOW, we are getting ready to leave again. We can't seem to stay home! We are leaving Sunday for Yuma, then on to California to see family and on the 23rd we fly to Hawaii for 16 days of paradise! We will be staying with friends in Honolulu for 3 days and then on the 26th we fly to Kona on the big island for two weeks. The first week we will have Jennifer, Mike and Bev: Ric, Janet, Ashley and Cammie; and friends the Waddicks join us mid week; the second week we have friends Rowland and Kathy with us. So we will be busy, but we will be warm and happy
and enjoying family and friends.

So until I post our next "blog" let us wish you a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year....or Mele Kalikimaka and Hauoli Makahiki Hou!