A Quiet Day--February 4

The day dawns clear and sunny and cold—30 degrees at 8 AM. We spend the morning doing indoory things—laundry across the street, playing the piano, reading, listening to music. We work on the bikes. Norb wrapped the gears in saran wrap before we left home. Somehow our bike pump doesn’t seem to want to work; it will pump the tires up to 80 pounds and no more. Norb disassembles the pump a couple of times, oils the gasket, swears at the thing, all to no avail. Would you believe that we bought an electric tire pump along with us? Yesterday I asked why and we agreed that there was no earthly reason to have brought it. Today we disagree. We use it to pump up the tires. We lube the chains. We put on the pannier. And we are off.

There is a bike trail right outside the park that takes us east to Gulf State Park. We then go in the direction of the ocean, always tantalizingly close but somehow it seems we are never going to get there. Then all of a sudden the road veers to the right and we are at Hwy 182 which runs along the ocean. All of the buildings along the shore are empty, there are 3 restaurants that are open—Waffle House, Hooters, and Marks Seafood. The sand is white and fine, much like the sand in Cancun. Wonder what it’s made of?

When we stop at a restaurant to see if they sell shrimp, I talk to the manager. He tells me that May, June, July and August are their busy months. Today he served 250 for lunch; during the summer they typically have 800. I suggest it might be a little warm down here in the summer and he heartily agrees and adds, “And it’s really humid!” He says that most of the people here now are the snowbirds and they leave before semester break when the place is inundated with college kids.

We find a seafood store on the way back home and get a pound of shrimp for supper. It’s a day like few others we’ve had—no great site, no special plans. I sew a button back on, mend a shirt, watch a little TV, check things out on the internet. Shrimp for dinner then games at the clubhouse—poker and whatever. For me whatever is more euchre. Four of us play and it’s a chance to learn people’s story. One of the women at the table doesn’t even live in the park; she and her husband have a condo a few miles away. They lived here for a year and a half after selling all their household things in Arizona and planning to full-time in their RV. But they got here and one month turned into two and then three and the next thing you know it was a year and a half and they decided they didn’t’ really want to full-time after all, so they sold the RV and bought the condo. But by this time they had so many friends in the park—and most of these people have been coming here for years—that they spend a lot of time even now in the park. It’s the birthday of another person at the table and she keeps leaving to take calls from family and friends. She and her husband come down in December and will be here until April. The other woman at the table is a newbie—they have only come for the past 2 years.