6/21/08 This Just Wasn't Our Day

Did you ever wake up in the morning ready to face the day head-on, things to do, places to go, tasks to accomplish? That's how our day started and with the toasting of my morning bagel it all went downhill from there.

Let me explain.

A lot of mornings I start the day with a Sara Lee Cinnamon Raisin bagel, toasted and then smothered spread with Philadelphia Cream Cheese. Like clockwork I put the bagel in the toaster, press down the handle and a few minutes later a perfectly toasted bagel pops up. Not this morning. This morning my bagel burnt to a crisp and we don't know why. The setting wasn't changed, the toaster doesn't seem to be broken but for some reason it toasted it until it was black and hard as a hockey puck. It got thrown away and I lost my appetite.

Ok, we have things to do today. Bob is in desperate need of a haircut so that's on our agenda. I haven't (gasp!) had my nails done in two weeks, so that has to remedied. Bob wants to get the back brakes on the truck replaced so arrangements have to be made for that and we want to go into Rocky Mountain National Park. Today. We want to do all of this TODAY.

OK, so we get in the truck and he puts "nail salon" in Doris, our GPS and within a minute we have a location of such a shop very close to where we are staying. Bagels be damned, we getting on with our day!

Bob drops me off to get my nails done and he leaves in search of a barbershop. I walk into the nail salon and much to my surprise there are only two nail techs working. On a Saturday! I was asked what I wanted and when I said a manicure the lovely lady looked at her appointment book and said, " I can do your manicure at 12:30". Hmmmm....its 10:45 and I turned around to look out the window just as Bob was pulling out of the parking lot. So I waited. I read the latest celebrity gossip magazines rags and waited some more. About forty minutes later Bob returned, shaggy as ever. He found three barbershops and NONE of them were open. On a Saturday! They all listed Saturday hours but nary a barber was to be found. He looked at my hands and said, "You didn't get your nails done?" I explained what happened in there.

So far today we've had a burnt bagel, nails still not done, hair still not cut and the day is young yet.

On to Rocky Mountain National Park. Once again we gladly handed over our park pass at the entrance. I've lost track but I think we are now UP eighty bucks on that pass. I'll have to go back over the past entries to get a true accounting of it.

So we pick a road to travel, not knowing where it will lead us. We made a stop for a photo opportunity. I do believe these are the mountains we can see from our site but don't hold me to that.

We soon noticed how crowded the park was. Hmmmm, maybe coming here on a Saturday wasn't such a good idea after all. We had to constantly pull over off the road because the motorists behind us evidently didn't want to drive leisurely through the park and take in all the sights. As fast as they wanted to drive it was quite apparent that they made a wrong turn somewhere on their way to the Indy 500 track. Bob gets very annoyed when traffic piles up behind us and he feels rushed.

As we drove along the waterway we could hear the roar of rushing of water and see it fall over the rocks in the stream.

The rocks just seemed to get bigger.

Boulders like this are everywhere.

I finally figured out why its called Rocky Mountain National Park.

LaVon, Bob spotted this dead tree for you. Oh great, now you've got BOTH of us scoping out dead trees! It isn't the best of pictures, darn camera, but take my word for it, you would like this one!

As the minutes passed the roads got more congested and Bob finally announced that we were leaving! He said that he has to watch out for traffic so much that he wasn't really getting to see any of the park. I could understand where he was coming from perfectly. So we'll return here in the next two days. Preferably on Monday so that at least the local people aren't here but at work or wherever the local people hang out at on Monday's.

So we go back to the campground and Bob decides to make some calls about getting the truck rear brakes done. In this valley, between the mountains, our Verizon cell phone does not have the strongest signal. In fact, we're down to one bar....sometimes. Sometimes, we have NO bars. Bob paced around the campsite, his eye on the signal strength bars trying to find the place from which he could place the call. Bingo! He found it. He pressed the numbers on the keypad and the connection went through. While talking with the lady on the other end he wandered from the spot he was in and the connection was lost. This does not make Bob a happy camper. He wanders around again and finds that special place. This time he got another person and he had to start all over again. Yep, you guessed it, he moved and the call got dropped. Why is it when we are on our cell phones that we cannot stand in one place? The same thing happens to me. I think we take the idea that we have mobile phones to heart. He finally made the connection again, got the same person as the second call and heard that they would have to see if they had the parts in stock or how fast they could get them if they didn't. The fellow on the other end was saying something about the day he would know this information but before he could get it all the way out the call, once again, was lost. Bob was too frustrated to call back. We'll get the brakes done at our next stop.

Bob took another shot at the fish in the lake but they were having no part of his bait and hook.

Late in the afternoon Bob decides its time for a beer run and I said I would go along for the ride. The whole quarter mile ride....if that. While he went into the liquor store I went to the very expensive Country Market. As soon as I walked in my eye was caught by some fresh baked pies on a table just inside the front door. YUM! Pie! I went to check them out and as soon as I read the price tag I knew there would be no pie in the Quinn household tonight! Thirteen bucks for an apple pie! Fifteen for the cherry! Those pies would sit there and mold before they made their way into my grocery cart I hope to tell ya! They were just pies for heavens sake! Nothing special, just pies. I wasn't the only one who felt this way, there were a lot of lookers,,,but no takers.

I did help this one fella who was in the produce aisle who had picked up two red bell peppers. I noticed he wasn't looking at the prices that were displayed so I went up to him and asked...."Do you realize those peppers in your hand are $3.39 EACH? He didn't and dropped them like they were hot potatoes. A little while later he came up to me in another aisle and asked me about the other items in his hands, was he getting ripped off or not? They were high priced but not as ridiculously as $3.39 for a bell pepper.

I was picking up a loaf of French bread when Bob arrived and he asked what I was making for dinner. Uh...Um...spaghetti? Nope, he doesn't want spaghetti and I didn't take anything out of the freezer for tonight. Bad Snookie! He couldn't tell me what he wanted so he walked up and down aisles and finally settled on a package of hot dogs for the grill. I didn't feel like hot dogs. See how our day is going?

The rest of the evening was uneventful as we watched TV, did our computer thing and settled in for the night.

Tomorrow has got to be better!