We Can't Seem To Go To Crawford Without Having Incident With Law Enforcement

At least it wasn't the Secret Service this time.

At 9:30 a.m. we loaded up the van with seven Lairds (and in-laws) and drove to south Dallas to pick up Matt (a.k.a. Cuz, as he's our cousin).  We had seven seat belts in mom and dad's van, and there were eight people.  So I sat on the floor in between the captain's seats and shared a bag of Sister's tasty chex mix with Cuz.

Joey pointed the heavily-laden van in the direction of Crawford, and we were off.

It took roughly 2 1/2 hours to get there.  It could have taken longer because we realized, as we neared Crawford, that the road we had taken last time wasn't on the map. (That tells you what a small town it is...)  So Joey and kept our eyes peeled and hoped we'd recognize the landmarks.

We did, fortunately.

We parked in front of one of the two gift shops and went inside.  (When I get pictures, I'll post them in the appropriate locations.)  The lady running the counter was really excited to see customers, we were her second group that day.  And it was noon.  We made a lot (a lot) of noise, examined just about everything in the store, and purchased almost nothing.

(I did buy a Texas star to hang on my wall which Andrew very rudely nicknamed The Death Star because Laura got poked with it.  Rawr.)

We mosied on over to The Yellow Rose (another junk, er, gift shop) and made so much ruckus there that we figured we'd better leave before we got kicked out.  It probably didn't help that we were putting t-shirts on the cardboard cutouts of President Bush and then taking pictures of ourselves with it.  Or taking pictures of ourselves in Extreme Combat with the stuffed grizzly bears.  (They used to be alive.)

The lady at the first gift shop had given us directions out to the ranch (although Joey and I were already real familiar with where it was because of the last time...), so we took our party out there.

Everyone was getting hungry (it was 1:30 by this time) and a little grouchy, so we located the President's ranch, the Secret Service outpost, and then turned around to go to the swimmin' hole.  (That, of course, being the primary reason for our trip.)

That being said, I should mention that we all had our bathing suits on this whole time.  Mine has a little skirt and, since I was wearing jeans, I had pulled the skirt out over top of the jeans.  It was looking Very Strange and Not A Bit Attractive.  (Probably another reason the proprietor at The Yellow Rose wanted to kick us out.)

It was a warm day and I think the entire town of Crawford was at the swimmin' hole.  We ate our lunch, put our water shoes on, and headed up the creek to play in the water.

We had a fabulous time.

The water was warm, the sun was hot, and all the annoying people were staying down by the waterfall.  We constructed a very nice dam out of large rocks that we dragged from hither and yon (even Cuz helped us, but we were very careful of his leg).  Our dam was so cool that, by a consensus vote, we decided we should take a picture of it.

Joey and I, pals that we are, went to the van to find a camera.

We found ours and went back to where everyone was laying around in the creek, sunning themselves.  (Honestly, there is no better way to spend an afternoon!)

Joey snapped several Very Cool Pictures of our dam, then laid the camera down by the van keys.  Sister, Laura and I went exploring and the boys continued slothing around in the creek. 

I should mention that while Sister, Laura and I were exploring I decided to try to hide from them and wound up in a patch of stinging nettles.  (The Texas kind looks different than the Iowa kind.)  What's worse is that Sister had seen me run off and so not only was my hiding unsuccessful, but I had stinging, itching legs for the rest of the afternoon.  Lame.

We were all tired and hungry, so we decided we should get our strawberry shakes and head home.  Everyone picked up their shoes and water bottles, and we headed to the van.

"Where's the camera?"  Joey asked me.

"I don't know, you set it on that rock by the van keys."  I said.

The van keys were still on the rock.  The camera was not.

"Maybe Cuz took it," Joey said, hopefully.

Cuz did not take it.  Nobody had.  Some little boys had been playing over where the camera and keys were, so we assumed they'd swiped it.  I pointed out said little boys to Cuz who went over and interrogated them.

Either they're good liars or they didn't take the camera.

We headed to the restaurant where we happened upon the local law enforcement.

"Hey, we lost a camera down by the creek," Cuz said to the policeman.

His eyes lit up and he started questioning Joey.  (Obviously it had been a slow day.)  The rest of us went to be seated in the restaurant (wearing our bathing suits with damp t-shirts over the top of them), but not before we had Mr. Policeman say to Joey, "Can I have your ID? We're going to have to file a police report..."

I groaned inwardly.

Twenty minutes later, Joey was STILL filling out paperwork for the policeman.  I went over and looked at it.  He was using official sounding words like "perpetrator" and "southwest".

"It's not going to do any good, and our strawberry shake just came," I whispered, as soon as Mr. Policeman went outside to get the license plate, make and model off my parent's van (Why?  Not sure...)  "Just finish it up so that you can come over with us."

He scratched in a few more fancy words and handed the report back to Mr. Policeman.  He then was asked to initial all scratched out words and go over the parts where the pen was running thin.

I rolled my eyes.  This poor policeman really didn't have enough to do.

Finally, Joey was able to extricate himself from the policeman with a promise to fax in the serial number off our camera on Monday.

(Did you do that yet, honey?)

We went into the restaurant.  Nobody else was talking in the entire place, they were mostly surreptitiously looking at us as they ate their food.  (Probably because us girls were wearing t-shirts with our bathing suit skirts...we looked like Very Naughty Girls.)

And, thus, we decided we'd better pay and get out of town before the people in the restaurant decided to throw us out on our collective ear.

So Joey and I are in the market for a digital camera again, unfortunately...