A difference between group and individual travel was the necessity of synchronicity. If we wanted to do something as a group, that meant I had to be awake which may sound trivial but I’m very comfortable with the organic sleep schedule “go to bed when tired/wake up when no longer tired” which didn’t quite jive with the rest of the car. Suzie had seemingly replaced the sleep centers of the brain with an additional adrenal gland and John was able to enter some state of torpor in the car allowing him to be unconscious for 2/3rds of the day. Mike and I required between 7-8 hours to be happy but he’s far better than I at passing up palaver for the pillow. Sleep came quickly in Dallas as everyone (nearly) had their own bed.
This being our rest day, I didn’t feel bad with “events” starting with lunch at about 2 PM followed by a trip to a mall to walk around. Most of the stores were pedestrian fair but there was a bonanza of fun at the not-quite-a-dollar store.
I'm secure with my masculity. Luckily, so is Mike.
Patriotic and festive, you double threat
She knows you have overdue library books and she doesn't like it.
The store also had a novel way of grouping items. The combination of butane fuel, hair coloring spray, and silly string looks like it’d make for a fascinating evening.
Party Platter
After tooling around the mall for 9000 steps, we decided on a seeing X-Men: First Class at the theater adjoining the mall. I questioned whether I’d be able to get into the theater with my wrecking ball of a DSLR. Solution? When asked, fake being “Ake”, the semi-retarded Swedish cousin of Dallas and reply to every question with “teekit?” while holding up my movie ticket.
X-Men: First Class was a solid B in my opinion with the standard plot liberties I’ve come to appreciate from the X-Men movies. The characters were a bit thin but that’s going to happen when you’re up against Sir Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in comparative acting ability.
We exited the theater into a sandstorm and a Burlington Coat Factory (NJ REPRESENT!) cart had attacked my car. I wanted to submit a note saying “look what your cart did to my car” but those cases never hold up in court.
Look what the cart did to my car.
We returned to the hotel to for Chinese food, laundry, and swimming, those items listed ultimately in order of increasing difficulty. My fortune cookie revealed the wisdom of “You need to work on your exercise routine.” Really? Either the cookie was acutely aware that I was away from home, had a wicked sense of irony, or…. was just a random fortune (probably that one). Laundry involved a quest to get quarters and the trade-off of a soap dispenser eating my change giving me full rights to kick it. While our laundry was in, we went to the pool side and again, Apocatequil was giving Zibelthiurdos pointers. Another time.