The Wrong Side of Otley
Topic: This and That

Let's try this again.
These two pictures were taken from that weirdly foggy day I wrote about a few posts back. The one on the left is closer to my house. The one on the right is farther, looking back.
I would like to say a big "HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!" to my longtime close friend Tara.
So, my day yesterday didn't go quite how I'd planned. Things started off well. I needed some wood glue so I went to the local DIY store, Focus. I got the glue, no problem.
I wanted to go geocaching. (If you're not familiar with geocaching, check out geocaching.com.) I'd printed out some caches to find, put the waypoints in my gps, and thought I was good to go. I drove a bit and parked where I thought I was supposed to. I put Ryan in his stroller and took off. I realized that the terrain wasn't really suitable for the stroller. However, we were right next to what I thought was the clue to find the cache: "Big holly bush." Sure enough, there was a huge holly bush. Two, actually. The only thing was, my gps said we had something like 48k to go. That didn't seem right. Ryan laughed at me while I looked around the holly bushes to see if I could find the cache (which I didn't). I walked back to the parking lot and realized I'd parked by the wrong place. So I packed everything up and drove a bit to what was supposed to be the right place, according to the description. This time I loaded Ryan into his backpack (much to the apparent entertainment of a woman staring at us). We set off and I quickly had a feeling this wasn't it, either. My gps still thought we had about 50k to go. I was thinking then that somehow it wasn't calibrated properly. So I trudged back to the car and unloaded everything. There was an ice cream truck parked nearby (I was at a national park and reservoir type place). Even though it wasn't exactly ice cream weather, it looked good, so I shared a cone with Ryan. Actually, it was in the 40's out, which is a lot warmer than it's been recently.
After the ice cream, we took off. Unfortunately I couldn't remember how to get back to where I wanted to be. Since I apparently don't know how to work a gps, I didn't trust it to get me back home. I wound up going the wrong way. I saw signs for the town of Otley, which I know isn't far from a main road leading back to Harrogate. Unfortunately, I wound up on the wrong side of Otley, and more than halfway to the Leeds/Bradford airport. On the bright side, I knew where I was. However, Ryan was getting fussy and I really just wanted to get home, which we did after a while.
A few nights ago something kind of strange happened. Someone rang the doorbell. It was a guy with short blond hair and blue eyes, holding up a piece of paper (quadrille, I think) with a hand written note on it. The letters were spikey and the note basically said who he was, and that he was a Polish art student from Krakow trying to sell his drawings. He had a bunch of 11x14 sized pencil drawings. They weren't bad. I asked him how much. He said ten pounds. I thought, "No way!" I said, "Five." He came back with, "Seven or eight." Part of me thought it could be a scam, but part of me thought he was, after all, out in freezing cold weather after dark, and probably a certain amount of time and effort went into the drawings, so I bought one for seven pounds. The drawings were of things like landscapes and kittens and horses, reproductions of popular images. On an impulse I bought one that jumped out at me. After I closed the door, three things occurred to me:
1 - I ought to have asked if he had any originals.
2 - I ought to have written down or remembered his name.
3 - I ought to have had him sign it.
Oh well.
I still have my cold. It's getting old. Ryan still has his, too, but he's a couple days ahead of me so I'm hoping he'll be over it soon. At least he's been sleeping through the night. For myself, I need to be getting to bed earlier. I've been staying up too late and not getting enough rest.
Today Ryan and I have been back in the UK a month. Seems a lot longer, actually.