Missed It By That Much

We are having a stay-cation this Spring Break, and we are having a grand time. Last week the kids and I sorted through all the options we have within a 90-mile radius of our home, and we came up with quite an impressive itinerary, if I do say so myself.

However, life is what happens when you are busy making other plans. Due to circumstances out of our control, we had to shift a couple of things around and put our Thursday trip to Blue Bell in place of our Tuesday trip back to the rodeo. This little change in plans occured around 11 in the morning ... a little later than the quirky "let's get up and go" part of me likes.

(If we are planning a day trip I like to go ahead and get out the door fairly early. None of this lolly-gagging around all morning business. However, lately I think God has been trying to teach me to be more flexible, and I don't mean by using my "Ten-Minute Pilates" DVD.)

But it was raining, and chilly, and Blue Bell runs tours through 3:30 p.m. during Spring Break so when we left at noon I was pretty sure we were in the money. Who else is going to be driving out to Brenham?

Ummmm, as it turns out, Everyone was driving out to Brenham. So when we arrived we saw familes huddled under umbrellas, the line snaking around the building halfway to the parking lot. I've been to Blue Bell lots of times and I have never seen anything like it.

I tend to be optimistic so I knew we were going to get in. I mean, we were this close to the tent that pretty much secured our tour:

I was still optimistic when the Blue Bell employee came around with her clipboard, counting families. And as she came closer to our little threesome I knew we would juuuuussssttt make it for the last tour, even though it was still two hours away. I even felt bad for the people behind us.

Except we didn't make it. We were one family away from securing the golden ticket. She finished up her tour calculations, looked right at us and said, "Sorry folks, park's closed. Cow out front shoulda told ya."

Okay so she didn't really say that. But we could hardly believe it! And, not a family who easily concedes defeat, we continued to stand in line for another ten minutes just in case someone else decided they didn't want to wait two more hours for a tour.

But no one did. Another Blue Bell employee told us we could go stand underneath a different tent to watch a video of the ice cream tour. Really? I mean, the tour is interesting and all, but if you've seen it once ... I put it in the same category as eating all your vegetables at dinnertime -- otherwise you can't have dessert! So we skipped that part and still had a great time. We managed to squeeze into the store with all the other dripping wet would-be visitors and buy a couple of T-shirts, as well as three scoops of ice cream. It's a good thing, too, because:

Rest assured, when we visit Space Center Houston later in the week, we'll be the first in line!