The Adventures of Fric and Frac: Adventure 202: Covered Wagon RV Park/Phoenix, AZ/ Post F

Home Sweet Frac

When I take bicycle trips with my buddy Ed Drouin, we have a daily plan to ride so many miles. I lovely refer to this plan as the "second to last lie of the day' because inevitably there are extra miles to be ridden. It happens so often that when we're in Vermont, we refer to these extra miles as Vermont Turnarounds. It's part of the adventure. Today, Judy and I had a few Phoenix Turnarounds when we were looking for the hair salon where she was scheduled to get her hair cut. We learned that there are numbered streets and numbered avenues and that if you plug in street when you really mean avenue, Susie GPS just dutifully takes you to the programmed address. The good news is we made it only a few minutes late, and now my Honey Bunny looks so good, I may have to compete with a few guys from Sun City to get a date for Valentine's Day (I mean she is refurbished her head to her twinkle toes). The good news is that we're learning our way around Phoenix. The bad news is that we nearly had to gve up our retirement card (Voluntarily it seems) because we made the mistake of driving down town mid-morning. You'd think we retired folk would figure a time when the roads were less busy. Maybe next week. While Judy was being treated exceptionally well by her stylist, Keith, I was enjoying an extremely pleasant bit of people watching at Lola Coffee, a very chic joint next door in what was the oldest part of down town Phoenix. Keith told Judy that you would not have wanted to roam this part of Phoenix six years ago for fear of muggers and thieves, but now wholesale gentrification has turned the area (Like many cities in America) into the place to go and be seen. On the way home, we stopped off at the Chinese New Year Festival for a bit, but it was a little disappointing, so we returned to our new favorite Mexican joint to share a really good and really cheap burrito. I suspect we'll know these folks by name before long. We whiled away the afternoon with individual pursuits. Judy caught up on Downton Abbey while I studied the Tai Chi form they practice here. It is the same as what I've done (By name), but each village and each teacher puts in a signature change to the form as well as some stylistic changes. It's enough different to seem foreign. My goal by next class is to at least know the "moves" so that when David corrects me, it will be about the essence of Tai Chi rather that style (I suspect he will still have plenty of fodder for correction). For dinner, we met Jim and Rita Valentine for dinner over in the high rent district South of Scottsdale at a place called Central Bistro. It was very good, and it is always a pleasure to see the Valentines. Jim and I were the first males to invade the O'Brien home back in the late sixties in search of love and companionship (Or so it turned out). Jim married Rita, one of the triplets, and I married Anne, one of kind. Their daughter, Tina, and more importantly, their grand daughter Anne Marie, live here in Phoenix. So, as they say, it was a no brainer for them to come to Phoenix for an extended visit. We made a follow up date for next week with the Valentines because, as I say, our social life is filling up as fast as a pretty debutante's dance card, which as you might realize means that life is good, especially today. Side note: The Cager leads 4-3, despite the fact that her shenanigans today included moving her pegs backwards so as to confuse me. It worked because after she moved them back forward, she ended up well ahead, and I was too befuddled to object (Lover's side note: It's hard to get a Valentine's date with your best girl if you hurt her feelings on Feb. 13-I think they call it discretion over valor-just saying ).