Day Tripping

"Day Tripper"! Don't you just love The Beatles? They were all the rage when I was growing up. While the lyrics of the song have little to do with actually taking a trip someplace, at least in the physical world, they do bring back memories and when I think about weekends that song sometimes comes to mind.

Tomorrow morning, after I perform Morning Prayer, I'm driving down to Alice, TX. Dad and I are going to meet there and swap out my 10 year old, working monitor for the used computer we bought from another resident at his retirement community. My monitor will work on Dad's old Gateway so that Mom still has a machine that she is used to and can play games on. The pre-owned computer will be a replacement for my Future Star one which is about 5 years old. Once I've got the data and software swapped out between the two I'll go down to the Rio Grande Valley and give the Future Star to Dad so that Mom's computer will be a newer and faster machine. It's more powerful than she needs but Dad won't have to upgrade it anytime soon and it's nice to have a spare just in case.

Today, I stared looking for directions on how to find the Whataburger on Hwy 281 Bypass at Alice, TX. A couple of weeks ago, I downloaded Google Earth. Initially I did it because my friend, Susan, had found it helpful and raved about it. Once I started playing with it I realized why she liked it so much. It's like taking one of the Terra servers and putting it on your desktop. Too cool!

Using the software isn't as intuitive as one might think. If you have an address you can locate someplace pretty easily. I quickly located my parents retirement community in Weslaco, TX. But today I'm having problems with it. I'm trying to get driving directions because it will give me an idea of how long it will take me to get there. There seems to be a problem with the addresses because when I put in both mine and the one for Whataburger and do a search I get an error message. This is possibly a problem with my address because for some reason the San Antonio mapping data has my address as something other than an apartment complex and I often have trouble using Yahoo Maps to get directions from it to someplace else. Since I can't get straight forward directions from Google Earth, I'll email Dad for a little more detailed set of directions tonight.

The drive down shouldn't take me more than 2 hours and we will meet and eat at the Whataburger. I was hoping to see Mom there too but it seems that when I suggest someplace closer and more doable for her I get an argument from Dad about not being fair in the driving distances. When we set Alice for the location to meet it becomes too far for Mom to go and the car is old and...well you get the idea. I really, really want to see Mom. So, since I can't get that to work this time, when I get ready to give Dad the rest of my old machine I'll drive all the way to the Valley and see her for one night and drive back up.