February 28, 2010: Round Rock and North

Neither Brian nor I slept very well last night although the hotel is great.  I had to be up pretty early dealing with work for the office as I am working from the hotel today.

I really like the Comfort Suites in Round Rock.  It is a very handy location for Dominica and I as well since it is really close to where we hope to be buying a house sometime in the near future.

Jarrad ended up not being able to join us this morning so Brian and I walked ourselves over to Round Rock Donuts and picked up four dozen of them!  Brian was pretty impressed by the line of cars waiting for the drive through winding out of the parking lot, down the side street and on to the main road as well as the line of people that filled the bakery itself and lined out into the patio area outside.

It took thirty minutes or more to get to the front of the line at Round Rock Donuts.  We bought our four dozen and then walked outside and sat down at one of the picnic tables to eat a few while they were incredibly fresh and hot.

From gathering donuts it was back to the hotel so that I could work for another hour.  I ended up having several servers down and we ended up being late for our brunch meeting.

It was just after eleven thirty when we managed to get to La Margarita where we were supposed to have been at eleven.  We had a nice lunch there with some people that I had met down at SpiceWorld last October.  I had fish tacos again.  The fish tacos at La Margarita were excellent.

I ended up being paged several times during brunch which was very annoying.  We ended up having to run around immediately after brunch to find good Internet access so that I could work again for a while.  We tried McDonald’s right next to the hotel where the WiFi is normally pretty good and, at least down here in Texas, free.  But after drinking some McCafe coffee and not being able to get online while getting paged and paged by people who couldn’t handle “don’t page me again until I get online – you are interrupting me from finding a way to get online to help you.”

We gave up on Internet access from McDonald’s and ran back to the hotel and were able to sit in the car outside of the hotel and get onto the Internet access from our hotel room.  That worked surprisingly well.  Wireless has come a long way in the last few years.  Once 802.11n is ubiquitous it will be really amazing.

We were stuck there for a while.  As soon as the servers were fixed we hit the road north to Temple, Texas to meet up with a friend of Brian’s that he has known for a decade or so but has never met.  Temple is very close to Round Rock, maybe twenty minutes away at most.  We are making good use of our trip this weekend.  Three meetings between Round Rock and Temple.

We met up with Sandy and Will in Temple without any issues.  Temple is a very small town so finding each other was easy.  We had been hoping to have had time to have headed out to their private shooting range and to have fired off some of their weapons collection including an AK-47 but we were getting late and did not have the free time that we had hoped.  So instead we just went out for a quick Mexican dinner at a little Mexican diner type place.

We were not in Temple for very long.  Maybe an hour and a half at most.  Then it was back onto the road to get up to Irving again.  The drive from Temple to Irving was well under three hours.  Maybe two and a half at most.

We got back to Irving, the drive went fine.  The whole weekend was really gorgeous with temperatures as high as seventy degrees!  That was a nice change from what we have been having.  It has been a very cold winter.  Can’t complain, though, with all of the snow that they have been seeing in the northeast.  I have managed to avoid what appears to be a record setting snow year up there.

Leave a comment