We left and drove down Ambassador Caffery Parkway in Lafayette looking for the U-Haul Rental place. They fill propane bottles, according to the Yellow Pages we found in the laundry room here at the RV Park. Bob found a young Cajun guy who came out to fill it up. Lo and behold, the bottle filled right up. So either there was nothing wrong with the valve in our bottle to begin with or it became unstuck as we rattled and rolled down the bumpy Louisiana highways. Bob was smart to just take our bottle in to U-Haul and ask them to fill it and see if they could get it to work. Saved us the cost and the hassle of a new valve.
We kept heading west on Caffery Parkway looking for a Post Office that the U-Haul lady pointed us to. We never saw it but we found drive-by mailboxes on a shopping center parking lot and ducked in to mail a letter. We turned back towards the center of town on Johnson, or Hwy 167, and went to the Antique Mall of Lafayette that we had seen yesterday on the way to the golf course. It was a nice mall but we didn't find anything we couldn't live without. I took a picture of a Telechron clock for my friend Jean in Austin who collects them. I'm really getting into this digital camera thing. Of course, nobody knows when I'll have Internet access so I can actually send her an email with the picture of the clock. But that's another issue. We could hear the rain on the roof while we were in the mall. It really started pouring. The guy behind the counter wanted to know where we were from. We told him Austin and he launched into a big comparison of Baton Rouge and Austin, saying many people claim the two cities to be similar. I'm thinking he hasn't been in Austin in say 10 or 15 years. Several folks in LA have made some interesting anti-Texan comments when they find out where we're from. I never knew there was such a rivalry between the two states.
We forged ahead through the rain and stopped at Golfballs.com, a large retail golf shop in a strip mall. They didn't have anything we couldn't live without either so we continued on down Johnson to around 5400 to Golf Connection, another golf shop. This one had used clubs and I came close to finding a nine-metal to match my new five and seven. But they didn't have the nine so we browsed around. I found more of the 'non-headache' visors like the one I bought in El Dorado. I really like that thing. But they only had four left and the colors were yucky. Too bad, they were only $7.00. I paid $14.00 for mine. I did find a bargain on a Foot-Joy glove that, you guessed it, fit me like a glove!:-)
We drove back over to Caffery and found O'Charley’s, a restaurant we liked in Jonesboro, AR. I ordered the same Pecan-crusted Chicken Salad that I got in Arkansas. Huge chunks of crispy chicken, candied whole pecans, dried cranberries and blue cheese with a balsamic vinaigrette. Bob got a grilled chicken salad and the Baked Potato Soup; but it wasn't the same recipe as the one we tried at O'Charley's in Norman, OK. After lunch we both grabbed an umbrella and went in the Target on the same parking lot so I could get my laundry soap. Wouldn't you know it, I fell in love with a small-sized bottle of concentrated laundry soap that is perfect for lugging around to laundry mats but you can only buy it at Target. We picked up some fresh fruit and a few other items and headed back home in a pouring rain. We stopped at a convenience store and Bob hopped out and got a paper out of a vending machine that wasn't quite far enough under the canopy to be out of the rain.
Back home we had a mad dash to the trailer with handfuls of grocery bags. Our soggy umbrellas are drying in the bathtub even though they don't quite fit. We settle in and read the paper to the sound of the rain on the roof. At least it is much cooler and the mugginess of yesterday has cleared out. By 5:15 we had to turn on the little heater. Yesterday we had the AC on! Just a few minutes ago Bob rain out when the rain stopped briefly to hook up the propane bottle. Now I'm updating my journal at the kitchen table and can see blue sky in the east on the horizon out my window. The weather map just came on the evening news and you can see that the brunt of the storm has passed us. There was quite a bit of lightening and thunder this afternoon.
It's 5:27 p.m. and 61.1 degrees.