No Day of Rest

I had not been sleeping well but after yesterday, I slept like a baby! It was a wild day. Non-stop. I need a day off!

We showered and were out the door early enough to be the first people at the vision counter at Costco to pick up my contact lenses and Michael's sunglasses. My glasses are due in today. We then bought a gorgeous rack of lamb at our butcher's before buying food for the week at Trader Joe's. Michael needed to swing by a friend's shop to pick up a few things before we split a lunch that was spectacular. It was in a dive. Love those. We split at shredded chicken quesadillas, which held us through the afternoon.

Michael continued his fight against the stump in the side planter box while I worked on our road trip. Everything fell into place as I made the final six hotel reservations except for one blip. At the beginning of the process, I contacted my brother to make sure the university in his town was not having graduation when we planned to be there. No problem, the graduation was going to be a week after our visit. Well, yesterday I tried to make reservations at two of the best hotels in town, which really isn't saying much. There are no really good hotels in his town but these are the top of the heap. They were booked. Both of them. I tried another hotel but Betty told me that it was used as a resident hotel and not where we would want to stay. Only one other one was not horrible. I tried and was able to book the last room they had available.

It bothered my brother that the other hotels were booked. We are talking about a tiny town, tourist town, a place where people stop on their way to somewhere else. He investigated and learned that Homeland Security was having meetings and practice in his town on the days we will be there, thus the hotels were booked.

Several hours later, I was finished booking the reservations and printing copies of the confirmations. I then made a list of the date, destination, how many miles and time to be traveled per day, address of the hotel, confirmation number, driving directions with maps, who we will be visiting and their contact information all to be printed out and the confirmation will be paper clipped to the matching information sheet. There were four pages with the title of: Final Farewell Trip #4.

So, we will pull one of the four pages with the confirmations for the next few days of the trip then bring the next day's with us into the hotel room so we can study the next day's travels. Then, we can toss the used ones as we go. We also carry a manila envelope to hold our hotel bills and any other paper we wish to save. On the envelope, we write the date, the amount of gas and the price per gallon we buy that day, the cost of lunch and where we ate then the cost of dinner and where we ate. It has been so helpful years later when we just couldn't remember the name of a hotel or a restaurant. We also list the state we travel through. On the final stretch of the trip, we list our favorite food, experience, our least favorite food, least favorite experience. It is fun.

While I am in the middle of all of that yesterday, Natalie asked if I wanted to see an one house in my neighborhood with them. Wouldn't it be great to have the kids swing by for a visit on their bikes? The house was fantastic but the market here is intense. We will see.

Today, it is back to Costco for my glasses, AAA to get the tags for the road trip car and a nice lunch with mom! This is a busy week for those of us in the Irish Fiddling world. Rehearsal will be Tuesday evening, a gig at a Wine and Cheese store will be Thursday evening and the big 3-hour gig will be at a restaurant/brewery on Friday night. I will need plenty of fuel and sleep and caffeine. I am not playing the actual St. Patrick's Day gig as it would be too much for the newly recovered me.