The Dynamic Duo

Since the website has been down, UltraMom has had a good excuse not to post. Now I must get more creative with my non-posting excuses, but after this weekend, I can’t use lack of material. It was a weekend full of excitement, adventure and most of all DRIVING…..
or RIDING , to be more precise. A friend and I (we’ll call her Peggy, since that is her name) went up to the far reaches of the North , past civilization as we know it, to the University of Idaho in Moscow to visit our sons for Mom’s Weekend. No, not in Russia (got ya!), though I think the drive couldn’t have been much longer. But I digress. Here is, as Paul Harvey would say, the REST of the story.
We had been planning this weekend forever; Peggy was a U of I Mom veteran, having had collegiate sons up there for several years, and she agreed to take the rookie (me) along for the ride. I helpfully left all of the arrangements up to her, such as transportation and motel reservations. She could not have been more gracious. When I suggested we leave Thursday afternoon and spend the night at UltraAuntDebi’s house near Boise, she was all for it. When Jim wanted us to bring his tires, so he could get his snow tires changed, it was “no problem”. Could we bring my dog along and drop him off at Johnny’s appt in Boise? “Sure.”
We loaded up her Tahoe about 3:30 Thurs afternoon and I went to get Murphy from his dogsitter’s house. Good thing we had lots of room since I don’t seem to know how to pack light. We were going along great until about 19 miles from Boise. We know it was 19 miles from Boise, cause that’s what the sign said right next to where we pulled off the road after the tire blew. I have to hand it to Peggy; she calmly steered off the road and whipped out her AAA card. In about half an hour, a crew of two arrived from Mountain Home to change the tire. I’m definitely going to have to look into getting AAA for myself. We made a quick stop at Johnny’s to drop off my precious poodle along with his accoutrements, and then a little shopping in the Mall and a good meal were in order. We made a few purchases at Eddie Bauer and had fajitas at Cafe Ole. We were halfway to Debi’s in Emmett when I realized I hadn’t given Johnny the shirts he asked me to bring him.
Debi wasn’t home, but very kindly lent us her house for the night. Her two dogs Jasmine and Anya Louise were glad to see us and we soon settled in for the night. About 6 AM I heard what sounded like ocean waves and very loud music, but it was kind of muffled because I was sleeping at the other end of the house from Michael’s room. Yup, his alarm was going off. Poor Peggy had the room right next to his, and she finally got up and turned the clock radio down after about 10 minutes, and boy was I glad! Though it wasn’t too loud in my distant retreat, it was still intruding on my dreams. We grabbed a few more hours of much needed slumber before facing the new day.
We had to find the Les Schwab tire place to replace the shredded one and gas up, and we were on the road by about…...........uh…...........11 AM or so I think. We loaded up with snacks from Albertsons, and headed north. I had brought along about 5 books on CD and numerous other CD’s, but we didn’t listen to any of them that day. We talked, snacked and enjoyed the scenery. One really annoying thing was that my cell phone quit working. Just entirely shut down and refused to power up again. I used Peggy’s phone a lot, but she assured me that she never used all of her minutes. I sincerely hope so.
It was great to see Jim. Peggy dropped me off at his place and went to spend the evening with her son, Paul, a handsome and friendly finance major. Jim and I went on a little campus tour and went to see Phantom of the Opera in the student theater in the SUB. Great movie. Then he allowed me to buy him dinner at Applebees. He had a hard time deciding what to order, as he wanted to take full advantage of being treated, but finally decided that if he got an appetizer along with his entree that the tab would be high enough. After dinner, he took me to the motel room in Pullman, Washington (about 7 miles from Moscow) where I found Peggy already sacked out.
The room was okay, but we had a little problem with the alarm clock. Sporadically throughout the night, it would emit bursts of static. It was just loud enough and frequent enough to ensure that I never actually got into that REM sleep which is so important to a well-rested night. Finally, about 6 AM (that seems to be our witching hour) I unplugged the cursed thing, and got a few good hours of sleep.
The next day, Saturday, Peggy and I met our sons at The Breakfast Club, a locally well-known and extremely popular restaurant. We enjoyed omelets, pancakes and biscuits & gravy before again going our separate ways.
Jim had a fun and exciting day planned for us. First we had to find the tire place to get his snow tires off and regular tires on. While that was being done, we walked back to campus to look in on the rock climbing competition at the climbing wall in the campus Fitness Center. That ended up being a litte too crowded and boring, but we hung around a bit and I tried out a few of the exercise machines. Then we walked back and got the car. At that point Jim seemed a little nonplussed, like he wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do with me for so many hours. We drove around town and went to a park for a while. We watched the squirrels and talked; quite enjoyable for me. We went to the Mall, which isn’t a great mall, but still fun to look around. We bought a soundtrack of Phantom for Johnny to thank him for the dogsitting. I really didn’t care what we did; I just wanted to spend some time with Jim, which is what I got!
We had tickets to a Mom’s Weekend dinner show at the SUB, so we headed there about 6. The dinner was good; salad, lasagna & pasta and death-by-chocolate cake for dessert. The first part of the show was a college group called something like “Dancers, Dreamers and Drummers”. I know there were 3 words in the title, all starting with “D”, but the “Dreamers” is the only one I know for sure. Anyway, they had a very unusual performance. In the first dance, they all held big plastic drinking glasses, and did this incredible rhythm thing, all in unison, where the glasses changed hands and thumped on the floor as they danced around the stage. In another dance they each held a big wooden pole, and in still another, all the rhythm was done with clapping. The finale used drums and a few other insturments with lots of dancing. They were fantastic. The main performer was “Christoper”. I think you can see him at Christophermagic.com. Anyway, he was entertaining, but the magic was pretty mediocre, and on the whole, I liked the “Dreamers” act better. We got out of there about 9, and Jim and I decided we wanted to see Phantom again, so we went to the 9:30 showing and it was nearly 1 AM when I got back to the motel that night.
Peggy and I didn’t see the boys Sunday morning, but just got up, breakfasted and took off. We were making the whole drive back in one day this time; about 11 hours. Again, we talked most of the way, though we did listen to a bit of “R is for Ricochet”, or rather she did as I napped. Peggy did all of the driving, which was fine with me. We stopped at Johnny’s to pick Murphy up, and he was excited to see me, though Johnny maintains that he had forgotten me and was just excited to meet someone new. He had, a la Johnny, a new retractable leash, squeaky fish toy and giant pig’s ear.
The only thing I regret about the weekend was that I didn’t get to meet a couple of Jim’s friends who were away for the weekend. On the whole, an exhausting and terrific weekend.
News Flash: Just chatted with Jim on IM and got the scoop on his Intramural Football game. His team finally won a game, by 1 point, and our boy caught a few passes and made some TD’s. All of the TD’s to be exact. He was on a high, excited about the game.
Well, I am utterly exhausted and had planned on getting to bed early tonight, but got sucked into writing this post instead. Hope this makes you happy, UB!
I am glad that the website is back up and look forward to reading something from UltraBob soon!
As Ever,
UltraMom