A mostly uneventful couple of days

Well, my husband's schedule came in the mail a couple of weeks ago, and I was momentarily excited. He was supposed to work in someplace called Brownwood. Now, there are several places with similar names in Texas, and I had this one mixed up with someplace else entirely.

Brownsville is in the very southern tip of Texas, about an hour or so from South Padre Island. Now that would have been an excellent place to go right before he has all this time off. Work a couple of days in Brownsville and then drive to South Padre and spend a few days on the beach.

And then I think there's a place called Browntrail, which is in a more northern part of the state, but not in the Panhandle area. It is very near the New Mexico border. Again, he could work a couple of days and then we could have driven to someplace interesting in New Mexico for a couple of days.

But no. This was Brownwood, about three hours away from us in the middle of nowhere. It isn't particularly near anything interesting. So it was basically drive there, try to find a nice motel and a couple of nice restaurants, work a couple of days, and drive back.

So I would have skipped the whole thing and let him go without me, except that he remembered something funny about the last time he had to go there. It had an Underwood's Cafeteria, though at the time he was there it was closed for remodeling. My husband and I both have less than pleasant memories of being forced to eat Underwood's barbecue, and we were wondering if the place was as bad as we remembered. There aren't many of these places around anymore, and in fact this might be the only one left. So we decided we would go to this place for lunch on Tuesday or Wednesday, just for laughs.

We were running a bit behind schedule on Tuesday, and after getting a room at the Days Inn, we barely had time to get a sandwich at Subway. And of course the restaurant would be closed before he got off of work Tuesday night, so we'd have to go to Underwood's for lunch Wednesday.

Wednesday, at a little after eleven, we pulled into an almost empty parking lot and read a sign that said they were closed on Wednesdays.

We had a good laugh and drove down the street to have some tamales instead.

He got off work early that night, but not early enough to pack and head home. So we went to Starbucks and then drove around for a bit to look at Christmas lights.

It was almost a wasted trip, except that he did make some money, and I knitted about half of a new scarf.

The next day we stopped at the Dr. Pepper bottling museum in Dublin. The line was not running, which now only happens on Wednesdays, and maybe not even on Wednesdays if some machine is being repaired. The "Dublin Dr. Pepper" (made with Imperial Pure Cane Sugar) in the newer bottles are now bottled in Temple with the Dublin recipe. We were each given a bottle to drink on the tour, but I don't really care for the drink myself, so mine is still sitting unopened in the kitchen. I would have made an exception and drank that one, but I still had the peppermint shake left over from lunch.

Anyway, we were the only two people on the tour, which surprised me at first, until I realized that they probably only have customers during the summer and on Wednesdays. And, with the line closed down, there's not that much to see. The man who owned the place the last time we took the tour died in 1999, and it's really not the same tour when given by a college kid.

Never mind. Christmas is just a few days away, and it's time to wrap presents.

Happy Holidays.