When you gotta go...

... you gotta go.

Joan asked about a trip into Brownsville today; yeah, that is "the big city," for us.  (Brownsville has a population around 200,000)  It is our closest big city, but we don't go there very often.  Amazon delivers to our house.  ;-)  Today, though, we felt the necessity to take on the traffic.

The reason?  Thanks for asking.  The cable TV on our island is undergoing a change: every TV will need to have "a box" to get the digital cable signal.  That means everyone on our island will have to go to Brownsville or Harlingen, to the Spectrum office, to pick up a box.  The change for us will happen in the next month (they just notified us yesterday) - we thought we'd be ahead of the crowd by going today.

Before leaving, I played some music for Joan and Rufus - they are both an appreciative audience...

Getting off our island is easy - there is a bridge.  The bridge opens to allow boat traffic on the ICW to pass.  This means: if the bridge is open, you are waiting in your car.  It is part of life here, so no point in getting worked up about the occasional wait.  Today, the wait was about 15 minutes - a bait shrimper was slowly making its way towards the bridge... during the wait, we had a great place to enjoy watching dolphins fishing by the pilings - two momma dolphins, each with a youngster.  No camera with us, but it made the time pass pleasantly.

Next stop: Brownsville.  We pulled up to the Spectrum office to find one parking spot available; going inside, it looked like the crowd at the DMV...

There is a place to check in as you come in the door - we were #14 in line.  A scant 42 minutes later, our name was called.  I asked the guy at the counter if this crowd was typical - "This is light.  Next month, we will be making the change for Brownsville - we're expecting 3 hour waits to be typical."

What a waste of man-hours.

Since we were in the big city, we did a bit of shopping before having lunch.  Joan found some good buys on sandals and boots for me at Academy.  I have been craving Chick-fil-a... and there was no wait there.

Back home.  Once again, we managed to make it through the border city traffic unscathed.  Whooohoo!  Sometimes you just need the outing, because... Chick-fil-a.  ;-)