Day Twelve

I did not want to work out this morning. I had been stiffening up since my mountain-running at Big Bend and was grasping for any excuse, but Dan didn’t wake up and say we needed to hurry and get on the road, and the hotel treadmill wasn’t in use. Since no one was willing to help me skip my workout, I did a half-hour interval session while watching a silly TV show about Mayans being from space. Does anyone but me think it’s a little insulting to say that just because we don’t understand certain things about an ancient culture, they must have been aliens from another planet?

Before we could leave Kerrville, Dan and I had a very important stop to make: Wolfmueller’s Books. We go to this bookstore nearly every year and rarely leave empty-handed. They specialize in Texas and Southwestern themes, both fiction and non-fiction. This year I scored, buying seven books, several of which will go on in my rare book bookcase. Two are about the Texas port of Indianola, destroyed by successive hurricanes in the late nineteenth century.

I now had a sack full of books and was happy, so Dan and I started toward home. It was great to be in the green rolling hills of Central Texas after so many days in the deserts of New Mexico and West Texas.





























As we neared home, the hills flattened out...
















...and then the landscape became cluttered with billboards, buildings, and other signs of human activity. The skies darkened and we had some real concern that we’d run into a storm, but the rain followed some sort of pattern of its own and we managed to avoid it. We went to pick up the pets and Pixel was unhappy, but fine. Cadbury, on the other hand, was still on his blog-friend tour, organized by his friends at the Houseful of Rabbits. I was informed that Cadbury would find his own way home in a day or two and let us know when he needs to be picked up at the airport. Brat.

Once I was home, I spent nearly three hours unpacking, doing laundry, cooking, and tripping over the cat. It’s important to me to put my life back in order immediately when I return from a trip, before I get busy with other things and lose the ganas to sort through a stack of maps and travel brochures or put away sweaters and travel food.

Tomorrow or the next day will be my vacation summary and lessons learned post. After that, I’ll return to posting at my main blog.