Thursday, November 13, 2008

Second Trip to Texas











Can you believe that I went from Iowa to Texas to Iowa and returned to Texas and attended two weddings in thirteen days? We did not bring a camera to the elegant wedding of my niece Megan so I don’t have photos of it. . The wedding was held in the Botanical Center in Des Moines with the reception in the Marriott hotel. The attendants were chic in their black dresses. The sports minded couple joked about his allegiance to the Chicago Cubs and hers to the St. Louis Cardinals.

We met our Escapee friends, Jerry and Joanne Pomeroy at a Corps of Engineers park near Benbrook, Texas. From our hilltop campsite we could see the skyline of Fort Worth. On Wednesday, we wandered among the brass longhorns in a park in Dallas and visited the grassy knoll where President Kennedy was shot. The somber presentation of that awful day was vividly portrayed in the museum on the sixth floor of the Book Exchange Building where Oswald stood. As Joan and I stood looking out the window, we heard the eerie sounds of sirens below us.
We met Terry’s cousins, Bill and Joanne Miller at the Red Lobster restaurant. We told stories and laughed so much that some octogenarians seated near us wanted to join the fun. Don asked if we were part of a comedy club. Joan said that we didn’t have a home but lived in our RV’s and met on the road while the other couple was Terry’s cousins who were still working. His astonished expression made Joanne laugh while the rest of us joined in. Don said we could remember them by thinking of Don Juan. He was Don while his wife is Wanda. I’m not sure if Don believed us when I introduced the others as Billy, Terry, Jerry and Joan and Joanne. He asked if we knew who the sixth President of the US was. We answered Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Monroe, Madison and John Quincy Adams but were not sure what order they were in. Don gave Joan and me a gold John Q. Adams one-dollar coin. We might be homeless but now we had money.


We were having so much fun telling stories that we didn’t want the evening to end. When we returned to Jerry’s truck after stopping for ice cream, Joan said, “ We‘re in trouble. The curfew at the Corps of Engineer Park is ten o clock .” Sure enough, we were locked out! The guys jumped the fence and walked the mile or so uphill to our campsite and returned with our car to pick up us women and load up the camera s and laptop and jackets and stuff. When the guys returned the next morning to retrieve the truck, Terry told the attendant that he felt like a teenager who had missed his curfew. The attendant asked, “ Did you bring a note from your mother?”

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