I got up and broke my fast at 40 hrs with my usual bacon and eggs, but I had to bring it with me as we drove, because she wanted to be out the door as early as possible. Here's my stats:
We drove out to Austin, only stopping at Buc-ee's once on the way there. Everybody else got a bunch of junk to eat, but I just got a bag of beef jerky and a bottle of sparkling mineral water, and was happy with that. Truthfully, I probably would have been fine with nothing, but you know how it is, when everyone else is eating, you feel that pressure to join them.
We got to Austin, and the trip turned hard to the south. The first thing we did was fine. We stopped at a mural of a postcard for Austin, and took a picture in front of it.
Then we decided we would go to the state capitol building. It was closed, I knew, but it would be nice to hang out on the capitol grounds, take some pictures, look at the statues and stuff. Capitol Park in Sacramento was always one of my favorite places to go because of how pleasant the grounds were. I assumed Austin would be no different.
Well, I don't know what it's like in Sacramento right now, but Austin had fences and caution tape surrounding the entire grounds. Apparently, it wasn't enough to just close the building, they had to barricade everyone outside of the greenery as well. I shook my head. I didn't understand that decision. Isn't out in nature both the best place for your health and the least likely place to catch a virus?
We did find a spot where some empty parking spaces were near the fence, so we jumped out and got a few pictures with the building, but that was all we got.
There was a cool graffiti park that my girls had been to when they went camping with some friends a few years ago, and we decided that we would hit that next, but:
They had a lot of cool murals and stuff on the walls at the graffiti park, but it was fenced off and closed too. I was starting to wonder why we had driven the three hours out here.
We decided to go to the Barton Creek Greenbelt trail for some hiking. It was about time I got some of my exercise in before the day got any later, or the whole 75 Hard thing was ending here and now.
My wife somehow got directions to the wrong place, and we ended up in some vacant office park with Barton Creek in its name. We tried again, and went the right way this time.
We got to the trailhead, and I was going to use the port-a-potty to take a leak before we headed off into the woods, but:
Damn! even the port-a-potty was closed. Isn't there some kind of laws that require bathrooms for certain places? Maybe that's just restaurants or something. I don't know. I was surprised, and had to run back behind the trees around the parking lot to pee.
I should have realized that the locked port-a-potty signified further troubles, but I didn't consider it until we walked up and there were two workers behind a makeshift desk at the trail entrance.
"Do you have a reservation?" they asked us.
"No," I said, "we need a reservation?" I didn't realize this was a fancy hotel or a fine restaurant. I thought it was a trail.
"On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday you need a reservation, and they're all full," he said.
This was getting ridiculous. I was getting pretty irritated. Now trails are hotbeds of virus transmission as well?
We walked away, thrice rejected by Austin, Texas, and got in the car. We started looking at the other places we'd planned to visit this weekend. McKinney Falls State Park looked pretty cool:
However, you need a reservation to enter as well, not to camp or anything, just for a day pass. Online all of the passes were booked for the weekend. I tried calling the phone number to see if they maybe had separate passes for people who weren't comfortable with online reservations, you know like old people who aren't internet savvy. State parks have to get frequented by old people most of all, because they're the retired ones, right?
The number only got me a recording. "Hi, our office is now closed," the recording said, "for more information please see our website. Goodbye."
That is, of course, not a word for word transcription of the message, but that was the gist of it. It was about as abrupt and dismissive a message as I've ever gotten anywhere. It made me laugh out loud when the recording simply ended with, "goodbye," and hung up on me. I guess I expected the option to leave a message, but they obviously didn't want to deal with any messages.
What else was there? Barton Springs Municipal Pool looked neat but Google said it was temporarily closed too.
We were defeated. We decided to just head back to the hotel, check in, and spend some time trying to figure out what else we might be able to do.
As I was pulling out of the parking lot, however, I noticed a bike trail coming away from the trailhead, and heading off into the trees. Maybe we could just hike on that.
I pulled back into a parking spot, and we got out to investigate. When we got to the bike trail, we noticed a big pedestrian bridge spanning out across the cavern created by the creek. We took it, and walked all the way across. From there, there was a sidewalk leading down under the bridge, so we took that too.
Before we knew it, we were on a trail that ran along the side of a dry creek bed. Had we just snuck onto the Barton Creek Greenbelt Trail without a reservation? I didn't know for sure, but I thought that we had. I was assuming that somewhere above us, the report of our skulduggery had gotten back to the trail concierges, and they'd called out the trackers with their hound dogs to come apprehend us.
We walked on the trail for a little while, but I couldn't feel comfortable or enjoy it, because of our clandestine entrance to the grounds. We didn't go for long, and decided to turn around and head back up. A dry creek bed wasn't all that nice anyway. I like creeks with water more, personally.
Getting back to the car was a difficult hike. It was quite an uphill climb. By the time we got back to the car, I had managed to get in 45 minutes of walking, so I was able to check one exercise session off my list. I didn't think to start my app up though, so I don't know how far we went or anything. No walking log like usual.
After the steep ascension, every one was definitely ready to go to the hotel and sit around while we decided what to do next. My wife somehow got the wrong directions again (she likes to use Apple's Maps app which I find vastly inferior to Google's, personally), and we wound up in the parking lot of a golf course. The map said we should get out here, and walk 15 minutes across the couse to the hotel, which was supposedly on the other side.
Funny thing is that this has happened to us a few other times as well. One time my wife was taking my son to the new aquarium for his birthday, and the directions told her to stop on the side of the freeway, and walk across a field to get to the building. Another time, I was trying to get to the raceway for the drag races, because I had free tickets, and the maps program took me to one side of the freeway, led me to a dead end, and told me to get out and walk across the freeway to get to the raceway.
Thanks for the help, Apple Maps.
We tried again, and finally managed to get to the hotel, though my wife decided that she didn't like the place much, because we had to drive through a pretty skeezy neighborhood to get there. Usually, I think hotel patrons wouldn't ever see the neighborhood. They'd just come in off the freeway, and it would be right there, but thanks to our wacky directions, we got to see the backside of the neighborhood.
We checked in, lugged our stuff up, and everyone flopped onto the beds, and turned on the TV. We decided that we would just hang out for a little while, then go get some barbecue for dinner. Then we'd go to the Congress St. Bridge. That bridge has a gigantic bat colony in it, and they come out every night to go hunt for food, and it makes for quite a spectacle. We'd seen a similar sight in Houston back in May, and it had been amazing, so we were interested in one upping the experience.
While everybody laid around, I went downstairs, and got the desk clerk to open the weight room for me, and did my exercises. Now I'd taken care of both my workouts. All I had to do was read my book and finish drinking water...oh, and take a progress pic. Someday I'm going to totally forget that and have to start over for the stupidest of reasons.
We went and got barbecue at Cooper's, a place that we quite like. Since it was located downtown, it was a pain to find parking. We searched for street parking, but found none. We wound up pulling into the first garage we encountered, only to discover that their rates were extremely high.--$20 for just the first three hours. Unfortunately, we were down in there with a car behind us when we found this out, and there was no way to back out, so we had to take it
I took a picture of where our car was:
And a picture of our parking spot number as well:
And we walked over to the elevators to head up to the street. We were parked in a Marriott Hotel garage, which was actually several block away from the restaurant we were shooting for. What was more rankling was the fact that we walked past several much cheaper parking options on the way to eat. We could have parked closer for cheaper if we'd had the patience.
At Cooper's, everyone else ate the bread, and the macaroni and cheese, and the beans and the peach cobbler, while I just ate the meat. Mmmm....meat.
We walked down to the bridge afterwards to wait for the bats to start their parade.
It took a while, and there was quite a crowd gathered. At last the bats emerged, and it couldn't have been more of a letdown. I don't know exactly what the deal was. Maybe we were in the wrong spot for a good look or something. It appeared as though the bats may have come out way over on the far side of the bridge from where we were standing, because I could see the cloud of them off in the sky, I just didn't get to see them come out. This was all we saw.
This day had just plain sucked, and even the bat bridge, the topper for it all, failed to deliver. We trudged back to the car, glad that the day was over, because everything about it sucked. But was it over? Trudging back to the car was easier said than done. As I showed in the pictures earlier, I took a picture of where the car was inside the parking garage, but I never took a picture of the cross streets where the parking garage was located. I knew it was on Brazos Street, but I wasn't sure about it from there. We'd searched around for street parking for a little while when we were trying to park in the first place, and we weren't sure just how far we'd gone from the restaurant anymore. I suggested that we cut across to Brazos Street early, and then just walk up Brazos until we found the garage we'd entered, so we did. So, we left Congress Street at 3rd Street where Cooper's Barbecue was, and headed over to Brazos Street, which was only one block over from Congress. I remembered coming at Cooper's from up the street, so I turned to walk up the street towards where we'd come from and (I'd assumed) parked. Turns out that we were a little turned around when we were walking to Cooper's. The door of the Marriot we came out of was not on the same street as the parking garage entrance. So, we thought we were walking the right way, but had to pull out our map to straighten ourselves out. This turned out to be a fatal flaw in our return to the car. We turned and walked up Brazos Street, passing one building after the next, and none of the garage entrances looked right. I looked on the map for a Marriott hotel, and found several--a Courtyard by Marriot, the Austin Downtown Marriot, but none of them were on Brazos near us. Something had to be wrong. Was I certain that we parked on Brazos? My wife was getting pretty peeved as we walked farther and farther up the street, because she'd worn shoes that weren't good for walking, and was developing a lot of blisters because of our trek. Suddenly, she finally remembered that the hotel was the J.W. Marriot hotel. We looked that up on our phones, and it was right on Brazos Street at...wait for it...3rd Street. That's right, we were right there when we cut across to Brazos Street. If we'd only turned right instead of left, we'd have immediately arrived. Of course, today wasn't a day for something like that to happen. We walked all the way back down the street we'd just walked up, worsening the blisters my wife was developing even more, and finally found the garage entrance we recognized. The day really had sucked, but we were so happy to get in the car, go back to the hotel, and let it be over at last. But was it over? We all got in bed, and my wife and daughter enjoyed watching HGTV on the cable, which is their obsession. I read my book, took my progress picture, and drifted off to sleep. I'd at least managed to complete the day of 75 Hard, even if nothing else had gone right. Then, at about 11:30 at night, I awoke to the sound of the eight-year-old waking up and going to the bathroom. He'd peed for a long time, and then when he came out of the bathroom, he didn't seem to know where he was, and tried to go out the front door of the hotel room. My wife jumped out of bed, and quickly grabbed him before he got the door open. He was pretty out of it, basically sleepwalking to the bathroom, so she led him back to the pull-out-couch bed that he was sleeping on. That's when she noticed that he was all wet. He had apparently peed the bed in his sleep. Oh crap, more trouble. She tried to get him to take his wet pajamas off and change into a dry pair of underwear, but he wasn't awake enough to respond. Instead he just screamed and resisted everything she tried to do. He finally went into the bathroom, but seemed to be absolutely furious about being disturbed. He slammed the bathroom door and then locked it. As she called his name through the door, he did not respond. My wife called me over to help her, and I had to pick the bathroom door lock, which was just one of those slotted ones that could be opened with a butter knife. Of course we didn't have a butter knife, but I found that a key on my key ring fit into the slot tight enough to pop the lock open. We went inside, and he was just sitting there silently on the toilet with his head in his hands, nearly asleep again. He wouldn't get up, though, so I had to pick him up. He's getting way too big for something like that, let me tell you. My wife took a wet washcloth and wiped him down with it, and then I carried him over to our bed, where he was going to have to sleep the rest of the night. The bed was just a queen. When Little was just a baby, he used to fit in a queen-size bed with us just fine, but he's not a baby anymore. He's not even small for his age. So, the rest of the night was pretty miserable. Sometime in the middle of the night, my wife couldn't take it anymore, and got up, pulled the sheets off the pull-out-couch bed and tossed them on the floor. Then she transformed it back into couch mode, and slept on the couch for the rest of the night. Now, the night was actually over, and Alexander's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day had at last come to an end. Tomorrow would be better, hopefully. Oh, one more thing, the next morning, when we were getting ready to check out, we smelled the sheets from the bed, and found that they didn't smell like pee at all. Little then claimed to have had a cup of water that he'd filled up the night before beside his bed, and that he had spilled it on himself before going to sleep. My daughter confirmed that she had found an empty cup among the sheets when she'd been gathering them up in the morning. Turns out all of that hubbub and freak out was for nothing. He hadn't peed the bed at all, but just spilled some water on himself. If he'd only gone straight back to bed instead of trying to walk out the front door, we may never have even felt his clothes and confused what had happened.
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