My Beach Vacation

It's my personal belief that it's mandatory for me to spend a few days every summer at the beach. It probably comes from the fact that I spent a lot of time at the beach growing up, and my parents ended up with a cabin near Galveston, TX. When my kids were little, it was the cheapest vacation we could take! I love the mountains, but I must have my sand, surf, and shelling adventure each year.

The beach is messy and hot. It usually takes a few days after you've left to get the sand out of everything. Sometimes there's a little sunburn souvenir to take home as well. But, oh...to lie on the beach with nothing to do but people watch and talk; to hunt shells for an hour or so, to sit in shallow water and have waves wash over you, to read a book totally for fun....now that's the kind of therapy that should make psychiatry nervous.

We take our summer beach adventure each year with my husband's brother and his wife. My SIL and I have developed some routines/traditions that we don't allow anyone to mess with, and that we add to (we're into growth and improvement) each year.

This year we decided it was important for us to set up a comfortable/cute (if you don't have cute, what do you have?) little camp for ourselves. We have a colorful umbrella, colorful chairs, and we laid a floor with a floral tanning mat. I bought us a little flag that says "Beach Bums", but forgot it at home. We have plans next year to have a main camp and a satellite camp. Such is the nature of the things you think up to do when you are truly vacated from your real life!

My husband rented a pink golf cart one of the days. When I was a kid, it was cool to have a Dune Buggy..now it's golf carts on most beaches. We tooled around in our cart on the beach to see what we could see, but mostly we just sat on that beach. We went from pajamas to swimsuits and back. At night, we played dominoes. Our husbands went to buy supper...we didn't even get dressed for that. It was fabulous! I hope everyone out there has a wonderful getaway this year.

Meet Crawfish Jack and Curly Sue

I spent this last week in Albuquerque, New Mexico with my husband. He was working, I mostly shopped and rested, although I worked with him on Saturday. We drove so that he could haul all of the things he needed to set up his booth.

Sometimes I forget how enormous Texas is. We live in the center and drove from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. to get to just past the Texas border. It's always good to go West...no one else is, and so the traffic is minimal. For miles and miles in West Texas, there is nothing but brush, cactus and mesas. The joke that you could stand on a tuna can and see forever is pretty accurate. We did go through one interesting area between Sweetwater and Lubbock that had literally hundreds of windmills all within a stretch of a few miles. This has apparently changed the entire economy of Sweetwater, TX and the area surrounding. Other than that, there's not much to see driving in that direction.

I love New Mexico, there's no other place like it. I've made short visits to Taos, and Albuquerque, and longer visits to Santa Fe and Ruidoso. As a child, I lived in Roswell for a time (Alien fame). Each of those cities is so different from the next. But, I've never spent any quality time in Albuquerque, so I was glad to go. Our niece recommended that we go to Old Town to shop and eat at the Church Street Cafe. She also told us that El Pinto was a great restaurant. We did all of those and she was right.

My husband, who is a retired teacher/coach/principal, now sells western belt buckles for Lone Star Silversmith. He worked at a ranch where the 28th annual End of Trail shooting event was being held. The people who participate in this are hard-core, pistol-shooting (I'm talking REAL guns, REAL bullets), period dressing, alias-monikered cowboys (and girls). They were lots of fun and very serious about their sport. Some of the people we met had names like Fishcreek Charley, T-Bone Dooley, Fancy Florence, Ringo Fire, Buffy Logal, and Prairie Flame. Since I don't like to be left out, I decided that my husband and I each needed an alias. So we are now Crawfish Jack and Curly Sue.

The members of the club are serious about their dress and have to follow certain clothing rules to shoot in certain events. Almost all of the vendors sold vintage western clothing. Let me tell you, it's pricey to be a vintage cowperson! Needless to say, my outfit from Ross bought at the last minute didn't quite meet the standards...but I wasn't shooting!