Well…for not doing anything it was a really busy week. I figured I better post and let ya’ll know that we wuz still alive and give you the trials and tribulations of our week.

As mentioned in the last blog…we had the center left brake caliper fail on our trip from Dam Neck to Fairfax last Friday. We got it looked at on Saturday and the parts came in Wednesday; so Thursday AM while Connie went off to the college for a lunch meeting Neil headed over to the repair place and got the repairs completed.

Sunday we drove down to Midlothian to have dinner with Bryan, Jenn and Alex as well as both sets of Jen’s parents…Tom and Marilyn and Wayne and Kim. We had an excellent dinner at The Melting Pot…first time Bryan had his Mom for Mother’s day since high school and the first time all of the parents were together with them since the wedding.

Monday we headed off to our dentist Doug Wooddell for cleanings and a scheduled crown on Neil’s lower right rear molar. When we got there…turned out that he actually needed 3 new crowns. Lower left rear molar the porcelain had chipped out and food gets stuck in it so that one needed replacing…upper right rear molar had a cavity under it and so it needed replacing. The insurance declined to cover that one as it was only 5 years old…doesn’t make much sense to me but that’s the insurance company leeches for ya. He went ahead and got those two crown preps done for installation on Friday. Dr. Wooddell had him come back on Tuesday morning for the crown prep on the one that was originally scheduled.

While all that was going on Connie took BAT over to the Ford dealer to get a recall completed that required some reprogramming of the computer system. Easy peasy for her.

Wednesday we stayed home…Connie worked and Neil laid around and hurt from the dental work on Monday and Tuesday.

Ditto Thursday except for the brake fix and Connie’s meeting and lunch down at the college.

Friday Connie worked again and Neil went off to get his 3 new crowns installed and finished up his cleaning…that got rescheduled from Monday as Dr. Wooddell needed the time that would have been cleaning to do the second crown prep.

With all that done…we came home Friday and just rested the rest of the day from our very busy but not much fun week.

This morning we got up and checked out of Bull Run campground…hitched up and were on the road for our 140 or so mile trip right around 0920. We battled serious traffic on I-95 south…stop and go with construction, merges, idiots, and general unfriendly drivers. We finally got here to Pocahontas State Park in Chesterfield near where their human kids live about 1420 and discovered that coming into a state park campground on Saturday is generally not a good idea. There were a total of 4 sites (between already empty and leaving today by 1500) available. One we wouldn’t fit in, two we would have fit but had a heck of a time leveling and had no satellite visibility and then there was site 121. We almost stayed in this one last time but weren’t quite sure that satellite visibility would work fine. 121 had somebody in it but he was packing up to leave so we parked at the front office and had lunch then came back just as he was leaving. We got pulled in to a tight entry quite nicely and parked with the best satellite visibility chances we could get…turns out that we get 2 of 3 of the DirectTV birds so we still get most of the channels we watch.

It was seriously hot so we setup, turned on the A/C, cooled off, had a shower, and ate leftovers from Connie’s lunch on Thursday and are now resting until bedtime. I’ll get Neil to take a shot of our site tomorrow and put it in the blog later in the week.

Ok…only one more thing to report today…and it’s kind of an interesting story.

Last Sunday night after our Mother’s Day dinner we were headed up I-95 on the way home. Got stuck in two really serious accident backups and about half way through the second one we looked up and noticed that we were passing the exit for US-1…we were due to get off at VA-234 which is the next exit past US-1. So…we decided to jump off the freeway and take US-1 up to 234 to get out of the backup. Turns out that US-1 actually runs through the US Marine Corps base at Quantico. We turned up the road and started accelerating. Came around a bend at about 35 or so and passed a speed limit 35 sign. Neil says that we might have been going 35-40 but definitely less than 40 since he was still in third gear in the Mazda. Well, the blue lights lit up and these two cop trucks start chasing the 4 cars that had just passed them. All 4 of us stopped…we actually thought that the cops were going somewhere and were trying to get out of their way. They sent the other 3 cars on their way and got our registration and Neil’s license and military ID as they were military police.

While the one guy was looking at the paperwork the second one asks Neil if he knew what the speed limit was. He replied 35. Cop says how fast were you going. He replied he thought 35 but definitely less than 40 due to the gear he was in. The cop says with a straight face “well, you were going faster than the car in front of you.” Neil says “I didn’t know that was illegal.” Pretty soon the first cop comes back…noticed that Neil was a retired officer and sent us on our way.

Long story short…no idea why they stopped him. He didn’t notice that he was going faster than the guy in front of him…and that’s sort of a self limiting thing anyway since you’ll run into the guy in front if you don’t slow down. No idea how fast we were actually going other than 35-40 in third gear (manual 5 speed transmission). 

Very, very strange I’m tellin’ ya. Never knew that driving faster than the guy in front of you was a vehicular violation on a Marine base…live and learn I guess.

Sorry no photos in here…but as we did no Fun Stuff© this week there aren’t any to post. I will get a shot of our site 121 tomorrow for ya.

Tomorrow is Mass then we’re off to the human kids to see grand baby Alex.

Cyas.