Monday, April 9, 2012

Lucky Day?

I’m sure I’m not the only person that wakes up some mornings only to realize that something is just not quite right with the day. If you are anything like me, once you discover this you try to be extra careful; you try not to undertake any task that has lasting attributes. I basically try to be humble and not get mortally wounded. This past Saturday was a case in point, and even though I discovered it early in the day, I never got around it.

My family and headed to the Georgia coast last Friday morning for a short weekend getaway. Even though we tell ourselves that we go to hunt shark’s teeth, soak up some beach sun and fish in a semi-private spot, it is probably just a thinly disguised plot to go on a shrimp run. If you’ve never eaten fresh Georgia shrimp you might just suggest Kroger, but if you have you might agree that this would be worth the three and a half hour drive by itself! The other activities are just a bonus.

After a good night’s sleep and an uneventful Saturday morning breakfast we headed to the seafood market to buy some shrimp. We could hardly contain our excitement when we discovered that they were larger than we expected and the price was right! After draining the water and rearranging the contents of my very large cooler, I carefully packed the shrimp inside and headed back to the hotel; time to pack for a day in the marsh!

We reached the hotel and the girls were about to go inside when my daughter pointed at the truck and said “Look at the cooler dad”. It had almost fallen out of the truck; I had forgotten to close the tailgate of my truck for the five mile drive back to the hotel. How I had managed not to scatter the contents of the cooler all over downtown Brunswick was nothing less than a miracle; a near miss. Looks like it’s going to be one of those days, I’d better be careful.

We are just about ready to head out when we discovered that the safe in the room was not working. We don’t usually travel with large quantities of diamonds and rubies, but we did have three laptops that I was hoping to lock up in the room while we were out. After several failed attempts by the manager to repair the safe we decided to just lock them up in the truck. It wasn’t going to be very hot that day, so we decided to just take our chances and place them in the floorboard covered with a jacket; you can’t be too careful these days!

The hike in to our favorite marsh spot is a long one so we packed food and water for the whole day. My daughter wanted to fish as well, so I took two rods and a small bag of tackle out of my truck tool box. There is really no good place to park here and it always makes me nervous that I can barely get my vehicle out of the road. After a check (and double check) we head for our favorite spot on this beautiful spring morning.

Well the day could not have been any better, we found quite a few sharks’ teeth and my daughter even managed to fight a large fish for a few minutes. Our lunch was great and the weather was perfect; what a great day! We were even patient when the hike back was made longer as my wife stopped every few minutes to photograph several of the hundreds of butterflies we encountered along the way. When we finally reached the road we noticed that there were several other vehicles parked along the road; our private spot was not so private anymore. I let the tailgate of the truck down for a place to rest while we removed our muddy shoes; we were now exhausted. Of course I checked to be sure that the contents of my truck bed were not disturbed, but I almost had heart failure when I my looked at the lock on my toolbox! We had been away from the truck for six hours…

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