Road Trip

Another month has passed and summer is truly with us now. Summer is good. We love the heat, which makes us the odd ones in the community. Of course this begs the question; why do they live here if they hate the heat so much? Just a thought…

Anyway, we went on a road trip yesterday, about a hundred miles south to the metropolis of Sacramento/Roseville. Where we used to live. We had a shopping list that could only be satisfied by making the trip and we were actually eager to go.

After our arrival, we started with breakfast at IKEA's. A $2 dollar breakfast which was more than sufficient. I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't customers who came only for the breakfast. Coffee is free. Then it was time for a bargain hunt and bargains are easy to find at this store. In fact, it only took us an hour and then we were back in the car again, heading to University Art Supply. There were no bargains here. But what an amazing store! If you're used to buying your art supplies from a catalog, or worse, from Michael's, then this store is heaven. I bought a small handful of supplies; one tube of a watercolor I needed and two tubes of Golden acrylic that I couldn't do without. Plus two sheets of 300# watercolor paper and a block of smaller sized paper for a grand total of $85. Ouch. It's a good thing this store is a hundred miles away or we would be bankrupt. Then we drove into Roseville and a drive-by of our last house. It's for sale! Again. I just checked the Zillow pricing for the house and it's now $100k less than what we sold it for. All in 6 years. I guess that tells you something about the hyper inflated market of that time and just how depressed the market is today. Of course the house was a disappointment for us as we saw our great (to us) exterior decorating ruined! The house had been repainted and our xeriscape front yard had been torn out and replaced by lawn. What were they thinking? Some poor fool will now have to sweat every weekend as he strives to manicure that patch of green to community 'standards'. I'm sure the neighbors were happy to see the lawn was back. Our small act of rebellion now erased. Yes, it was that kind of community.

After that, we drove over to the more affluent side of town and after a stroll through their shopping center, (The Fountains at Roseville) I can only say that the current depression/recession has not hurt the very rich. It was the middle of the day and the place was packed.

After that it was time to get out of town and come back home to reality. And on our way back, we stopped at an Applebee's restaurant for dinner. Which was surprisingly quite good. Maybe it wasn't surprising, but we've never been fans of this restaurant chain and had stopped only because it was the last place around before we encountered a desolate stretch of I-5. While we were waiting for our dinner, I noticed and read the mandated nutritional value information for this chain of restaurants. I don't know if the information deters anyone from ordering their favorites, but it was certainly eye-opening! You might think that a chicken laced garden salad would be a good choice, but the Applebee version contained about 1600 calories, the equivalent of three healthy meals. It should be noted that the nutritional information is on the back pages of the dessert menu. How clever…you'll never see it till the damage has been done!

12 hours had gone by and we were home…