A Latin Restaurant and More Plans Gone Wrong

Fried Plantains! I had been craving them. Jason said they tasted like bananas. 🙁

Our Weekend Getaway, Part 2

If you’re looking for Part 1, click here.

If there is one thing I need to learn this summer it is that no matter how well I plan, I need to be ready and happy when things don’t work out like I want them to.  We left the kids with my sister early on a Friday evening.

I had found a Latin restaurant in Dallas and was really looking forward to it.  The meals we ordered were mostly from Venezuela, and the food was delicious. We splurged, ordering an appetizer and ending our meal with dessert.

After we ate, we drove toward our hotel.  We had planned to go to a movie after dinner.  The theater was right across the street from our hotel, so we located our hotel but didn’t stop to check in since there wasn’t much time until the movie started.  We saw the big AMC sign and drove across the street.  Well, the theater was in a mall.  We drove around the entire huge complex but didn’t see an outside entrance for the theater.

Finally, Jason just parked and said we’d go inside and find it.  No biggy except I was in my cute little wedge sandals–not mall walking shoes.  My husband, having no concept of cute little shoes, ranted the entire way that I wasn’t going faster and couldn’t understand why my feet would be killing me, a lesson he didn’t learn on our honeymoon, evidently.  Finally, I took off the shoes and after showing him the blister already starting to form, walked barefoot through the mall.  He evidently thought my going shoeless was worse than my walking at a snail’s pace because he proceeded to tell me what all was on the floor and list all the possible diseases I could catch from walking barefoot.  All of our walking was in vain.  We could not find the theater.  It was too late.  The movie had already started.

We walked back to our car and decided to drive around and search for the entrance again.  That way, if we decided to watch the movie the next day, we would be able to find it.  We parked again and WALKED back in.  This time I decided I was going to ask someone.  I walked up to the first person that looked official in the big department store and blurted out, “I need help!  It has nothing to do with this store, but where on earth is the theater?”  Would you believe it was his third day on the job and he could only vaguely tell us how he thought we might find it?  Oh, yeah.  But find it we did and my feet overjoyed to get back to the car and rid themselves of the horrid shoes.

We were very happy with the hotel room that we had purchased on Priceline.com for only $40 each night.  The Doubletree was beautiful and they wooed me with their delicious free chocolate chip cookies.  The room was nice, but I might not have even noticed if it hadn’t been as my mind was on the yummy free cookies.

We enjoyed our evening, and I felt like a queen in the huge expanse of bed. That is, until about eleven o’clock.  That is when it started:  the slamming of doors, the knock, knock, knocking and the hyena laughing.  It sounded like a huge bunch of women and kids had moved in next door.  Pretty soon I decided it had to be a family reunion or something because of the constant knocking and opening and slamming of the door.  I contemplated complaining, but really hated to ruin someone’s fun.  Surely by one o’clock or so they would all go to bed.  I didn’t mind that much if they kept me up a little late.  But it didn’t stop.  I would doze and wake up every few minutes until after 4:30 in the morning!  At that point I thought again about complaining, but Jason was asleep and I hated to wake him up by using the phone, so I just endured.

Continue reading here…