MIKE McCORMICK My wife Pat and I usually stay close to home on holiday weekends.
Seldom do we travel even down to our small place at Lake Eufaula.
But this Labor Day weekend we decided to venture down to our place that we hadn’t been able to since the last weekend in March of this year.
It was nice to spend a weekend, even though it was over part of the holiday, at our little place we purchased about eight years ago.
That was a few months before I retired from a job that I held for 47 years.
Our close friends, Gary and Charlotte Barnett, also journeyed down. They have the trailer right next to ours.
Literally, we can go directly from our deck to theirs.
We had gotten down there a bit before 1 Friday afternoon. They weren’t able to get there until a little later.
We met some new neighbors, too, who are from the McLoud area.
In March, we de-winterized the trailer thinking we would return within a few weeks and be back several times over the summer. But, for one reason or another, we hadn’t been able to get back down there.
Once we unloaded our car, which didn’t take long, the first chore I was assigned was tackling the grass and weeds that had been growing over the past five months.
With the small electric lawnmower we have down there, it only took a little more than an hour to cut down the grass and weeds.
The temperature was about 90 with the humidity higher than that.
But once finished, that was the heaviest chore we did all weekend.
We decided we better go eat a late lunch and went to a small restaurant we’ve been talking about trying. It was really good.
We went back to our trailer and both of us just rested and relaxed.
This was the first time we’d been down there since we had to have the vet put Bailey, our little Shih Tzu, to sleep on Monday after Mother’s Day. For nearly eight years she made the trip with us nearly each time we went.
There were few times she wasn’t with us. It seemed a little strange, as it continues to around the house as well.
Pat and I, Gary and Charlotte didn’t do anything really special last weekend. We did relax, enjoyed eating out and traveling around the lake some.
It was just nice to spend a weekend away.
Staff column