Sunday morning arrives and Dave and I decide to quickly gather all of our "stuff" and hit the road back to Birmingham as early as possible. This way we would avoid a lot of the inevitable heavy traffic heading north on our 4-5 hour trek.
Or so we thought.
Of course, staying true to form, I had pretty much packed most of the food in my house to take to the beach...and, now had to repack the cooler with what was left. My motto is to always be prepared...and I was. But, what was I thinking? Dave just shakes his head and laughs at me as he sees all of the stuff that we now have to drag back home.
What's a girl to do? I like to have all of my possibilities covered. : )
In cleaning up around the condo kitchen, I spotted a phone charger that was left there by one of our Thursday night guests: the bride! I carefully put it in a little grocery bag, put a slip of paper with the names and phone numbers and called our friends to tell them that we would leave it at the front desk for them. They were relieved that we had it and would pick it up that day in that they weren't leaving until Monday.
Now, just to be safe, I hung the little bag with the charger on one of the side hallway doors so that we wouldn't forget to take it with us.
Smart, right?
Wrong!
I also hung a large bag of garbage on the front door knob so that we could just drop the remaining garbage down the shoot on our way out.
Fortunately, we remembered to do that. Unfortunately, Dave did not realize that the little bag wasn't garbage and down the shoot it went with the rest of the condos garbage.
oops!
So, in the midst of our trying to get out early, Dave had to go down into the basement with the condo manager and try to sort through the dumpster in search of the phone charger! As he was "dumpster diving"-- bags of garbage were being sent down the shoot and dropping all around him Needless to say, he wasn't happy about all of this...nor was he successful in finding the little bag containing our friend's charger.
While he was doing all of this, I was making a little breakfast for us before we hit the road. The nice soft bagels that I had brought with us were quite hard and chewy at this point...but I still attempted to slice them and toast them. Of course, the knife slipped and...I stabbed myself in the palm of my hand. Ouch!
So, I'm bleeding, he's aggravated and we get in the car for our lovely trip home.
Leaving the beach area went smoothly without a hitch...with traffic flowing freely. Once we got on the expressway we were really zipping along.....until.....
We saw the cars up ahead stopping short....rubber tires burning....screeching....and a few unlucky cars crashing into each other.....
Luckily, Dave was cool and calm....and did not panic as he swerved off of the road to avoid hitting anyone and brought the car to a stop without any damage. We were very fortunate that nothing worse occurred. I was proud of his unruffled demeanor and made sure to tell him so.
All was not over though as the traffic for the next hour or so was pretty much at a virtual standstill and then moved at a slow crawl for miles. A pretty horrific accident had occurred miles ahead of us and this had to be cleared away. One never likes to hear about accidents and it cast a pall over the remainder of the drive home.
To add to all of this, I have decided that I must have a bladder the size of a peanut in that we needed to make several stops along the way for me. As you can imagine, this all added to Dave's delight with how the trip home was going. Hey, when you've got to go....you've got to go!
We did end on a nicer note as we stopped at the famous "Peach Park" in Clanton, Al. We bought a nice basket of peaches and left with some homemade frozen peach yogurt for me and a peach caramel ice cream cone for Dave. Ahhhhh.
Oh, but did I mention that Dave left the beach with a horrendous sunburn?
More on that tomorrow....
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