A good weekend.

Friday afternoon Carol and I left town with our pop-up camper (air conditioned – don’t worry! We may be Texans, but we’re not crazy!) AND our good friend Ruth (the wedding cake lady) to go have a golf weekend.

We stayed in Buescher State Park near Smithville, TX.

No, I didn’t THINK you’d know where that is (except the folks from the Austin area who are regular readers... and maybe my Dallas area friends). It’s about 50 miles east of Austin on Highway 71.

We stay there because the State Park facilities are always clean and well-maintained, and because it’s close to Bastrop, TX.

What’s in Bastrop? Two golf courses that we enjoy playing.

All you non-golfers can skip the next paragraph. I’ll meet you two paragraphs down.

One reason we enjoy those courses is that many of the holes have significant elevation changes. Victoria, TX, is on the Coastal Plains (flat!) and the only ups and downs we get are from the slopes around the “push-up” greens. (They are elevated slightly to improve drainage.) The courses at Bastrop have several par 3s that make you feel like you’re teeing off from the top of a cliff to a green 100 feet below you.

On the way to the park, which is about an hour and 45 minute drive from Victoria, Carol and Ruth sat in the back of the van playing with our laptop computer and our new GPS antenna. It’s addicting to stare at the screen with a map displayed and a little car symbol tracking along the highway. Some of the map detail is extraordinary. When you zoom in close and click at a spot on a street, the screen will display the address (number and street name) where your cursor is. No more searching for, say, the 900 block of a certain road. Now we can know exactly where that is.

So, we spent Friday evening getting settled in and having supper. We had learned that a particular restaurant in Bastrop has a free wifi hotspot, so we drove into their parking lot and fired up the laptop. Sure enough, no security or network key was required, and we logged on and could surf the net. At that same location the laptop detected a second hotspot from the nearby Holiday Inn. I say “nearby,” but it was over 150 yards away! We drove around a bit testing the range of their transmitter and were amazed that we had a useable signal while inside our van for several hundred yards.

OK, enough computer stuff. On Saturday we played 36 holes of golf (riding, not walking — it was 99 degrees in Bastrop that afternoon!) Back to the camper, shower and dinner, a little TV, and we all crashed.

This morning we were up at 6, another 18 holes starting at 8:30, then back to the camper for lunch before loading everything back in the car, lowering the camper, hooking on and pulling out of the park.

We made it home at about 4:30.

I anticipate an early night tonight and a restful day at work tomorrow.

Don’t worry, Greg; I’ll get everything done! I may just be moving a little slower than usual tomorrow.

(Greg’s my boss, and he reads my blog sometimes. He’s a golfer too – and much better than me – so I’m sure he’ll understand.)

(I hope.)