The clocks have changed, and all of a sudden, my time is no longer my own.
This past weekend was my last free one before the wedding. From now till after my name changes, I have something going on every single (pun intended) weekend.
As fate would have it, my last free weekend as a free woman coincided with a professional conference my fiance attends every year. It was also a three-day weekend for me. I didn't want to spend the whole weekend alone, and I had a free frequent flyer trip due me, so I decided to get out of town.
I called up my old college roommate, Miranda, in Fayetteville, NC, and invited myself down to her neck of the woods. She eagerly accepted my self-invitation, and I booked a flight. It was the perfect thing to do.
Miranda has always been one of my favorite people to hang out with -- she's fun, quirky and gets amused by the same random things that amuse me. In the good old days, we laughed constantly, usually about nothing at all. For the two years we were roommates, hardly a day went by that we didn't come up with some new silly inside joke. It was pretty annoying to the people around us, but we had a blast.
I hadn't seen my pal in more than a year, and both that visit and one before it had been at weddings (one of them hers, to a man I am happy to say shares her goofy sense of humor), so we didn't get a chance to just hang out. It makes me kind of sad sometimes that our friendship has evolved in this way; we used to be so close, and now we never see each other. She hasn't even met my fiance yet. It's just so hard to find the time and money to get together. It's just how life goes, I guess, and I think we would be pretty pathetic figures today, had we not gone on to find lives and friends beyond college.
But I still really appreciate it when we are able to hang out and laugh like we used to, and I'm glad I took this weekend to do just that.
During my stay in Fayetteville, Miranda and her husband, Jeremy, showed me some of their favorite North Carolina hot spots -- the nature trail they like to walk, the Mexican restaurant they patronize for great chips and salsa, their favorite dollar store, the theatres they volunteer in and the area's best place for some tasty North Carolina barbecue. They even took me on a little side trip to a winery an hour or so away in Rose Hill, NC, so I could taste how the South does grapes.
But the most exciting destination was not on the agenda -- a fact I can prove, because I took a picture of the agenda. As we approached the winery, we passed a bright red and white pavillion. When I read the sign on it, I couldn't believe my luck. What a wonderful unexpected discovery! I suddenly understood how the first Texan to strike oil must have felt.
It was hard to believe, but there I was, within spitting distance of the World's Largest Frying Pan.
Being a lover of all things quirky, I had always wanted to see the world's largest something. I had been to the World's Largest Truck Stop before, and according to Jeremy and Miranda, Fayetteville is actually home to the World's Largest Wal-Mart, but this was different. Those places were made large to make large amounts of money. The World's Largest Frying Pan -- although most likely built as part of a publicity stunt that I'm sure brought money to some cause or business (I was too excited to read any of the information while I was there) -- now exists simply for the sake of being large.
Oddly enough, it was the perfect thing to see while visiting Miranda -- a silly, random, goofy thing that we just happened upon. We could never in a million years have thought to look for something as weird as the world's largest frying pan, and if we had, we'd never have found it. We'd have had better luck searching for a cat in a cup full of nails*.
I suppose it is also strangely appropriate that my last weekend as a single gal was the weekend we changed our clocks and were hurled an hour into the future. With six weeks till the wedding, things seem to be moving faster and faster each day. Before I know it, the big day will be here.
Before this big leap into tomorrow, though, it was nice to take a trip down Memory Lane. It was even nicer to know that the good times don't have to stay there. Over the weekend,we did a good bit of laughing about the old times, but we had quite a few new laughs as well**. We'll probably never again live in the same state, and I'm sure that as the years pass, we'll have more and more going on in our own lives that has nothing to do with each other. But I hope we'll still make an effort to see each other.
We'll just have to take the time.
___________
*See what I mean about the inside jokes? That cup full of nails thing made no sense to you, did it?
**More laughs than a cup full of nails. See? Annoying as crap, isn't it?
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