Elise and I had a nice 4th of July weekend. I rushed home from work on Friday, ducked into a store to buy some flowers and went home to pick Elise up for our date. We hadn’t gone out on a date for a while so I figured I’d arrange for dinner and a movie. We went to Mirabelle for dinner. The food and service were both great. Elise had the Herbed Crusted Halibut with a Chive-Asparagus Fondue with a glass of Conundrum chardonnay. Yours truly had the Roasted Duck Breast with Fennel-Merlot Jus. Both entrees were excellent. I really wanted to stay to try the Peanut Butter Mousse Cream Torte (I’m not a dessert person but heard this torte was a must-have) but we were in a hurry.
We rushed out of the restaurant and drove to Barton Creek Cinema to see Dodge Ball. You can save yourself a little money by watching the trailer. The movie wasn’t good. All of the funny parts are in the trailer – the rest of the film is filler. I found myself watching the couple in front of us playing with their baby more than I was watching the movie.
We woke up on Saturday and packed up for a trip to New Braunfels. We stopped at the grocery store for the toobin’ essentials and then stopped for a hamburger. We made it to New Braunfels around 1:30 – just in time for the temperature outside to get hot enough to make the frigid Guadalupe River a relief. We floated. And we floated. Floated some more. At one point we hit some rapids. I hit my tailbone on rocks. That hurt. We floated. And we floated some more. At another point we hit some rapids. I hit my tailbone again on rocks – only this time I hit the rocks harder.
Towards the end of our float, we had a friendly conversation Matt and Christine, two Army nurses who recently returned from the Middle East. After losing my flip flops, finding them, flipping out of my inner tube, losing the cooler, reacquiring the cooler and soaking up a lot of sun, we hopped in the Jeep and headed back to Austin. We stopped at El Arroyo for a late fajita dinner before calling it a night.
We woke up early on Sunday and washed the Jeep and the truck. While Elise washed the Jeep, I mowed and pulled up some bad backyard landscaping that was left by previous owners. That made for a nicely sun burnt back. We spent the rest of the afternoon finishing the paint job in our bedroom.
Later that evening we scooped up Victor and drove to Auditorium Shores to watch the Fourth of July fireworks display. We all agreed that this year was the best display we had collectively seen. Elise and I drove home, sat on the tailgate of my truck and shot bottle rockets from a beer can and listened to that Lee Greenwood song.
To most: have a nice Independence Day After – the rest of us have to work.