For your reading enjoyment, we continue to publish Rambling Vines by the late Marylea Vines as she recalls events and names of Corning folks from many years ago. We are currently in the year 1992.

Would you believe that after seven years of attending the Arts and Crafts Show in St. Charles, Missouri that we managed to show up on the wrong weekend for this year’s show? We did! It was not entirely our fault. What those folks call a weekend and what we call a weekend are two different things… they don’t count it a weekend unless it includes a Friday. To us a weekend is Saturday and Sunday and the third weekend in August should have been the 14th and 15th.

Not to be outdone, we went right on having an enjoyable weekend as planned… in fact, I don’t know how we could have crowded the craft show into our schedule.

We had planned to slow poke around between here and there, taking in anything that looked interesting and had told my niece there was no need to leave a key outside for us because she would be home from work before we arrived… famous last words! She had drawn us a map to show how to deliver my aunt and uncle where they were going in St. Charles and then travel on to her house in St. Peter’s without getting back on the interstate in the late afternoon traffic. No problem, we whipped out that map and just drove right up to her house for a two to three hour wait. We took off for a nearby shopping center and just about went broke before we even got Ole Blue unloaded.

We had a time convincing Sharon and Dave that we really did intend to sleep in their basement, but they finally consented. They have a large basement with a bathroom. There is a table and chairs and lots of exercise equipment and we used pads from their lawn furniture for beds and blankets for covers… it was almost as much fun as those long-ago teenage bunking parties. My nephew said that we sounded like a group of Girl Scouts on a camping trip. Of course, trying to be quite just made everything funnier.

We hit the floor running each morning and kept a steady pace until we either got hungry or the stores began closing on us. We tried every kind of fast food offered throughout the day, then had a decent evening meal.

I never did think I would like to live in a city, now I am convinced… I would go nuts over shopping centers if nothing else. There is no way that a person can go to all the shopping centers each week and see everything that is being offered. I don’t like to turn loose my money until I have seen all the choices. So, there you are, it wouldn’t be the traffic that freaked me out, it would be the shopping centers… too many of them!

On Sunday morning when it was time to pick up our passengers, we tried just running the homemade map backwards. That didn’t work too well, and we ended up in a strange territory asking advice from a service station attendant.

We just thought we were loaded going up, coming back was much worse. It was so bad that to make a pit stop I had to hop out, open the rear sliding door, set a couple pieces of luggage out on the ground to make room for the four in the back to get out. There was stuff under the seats, between the passengers in each of the rear seats, everyone had a package for a foot rest and the area behind the seats looked like Fibber McGee’s closet… to tell the truth, we looked like part of a traveling side show, but we were having a good time.

When we got home, I put little Putter inside, then began unloading the car. Quite some time had gone by before I checked to find him stretched out, flat of his back underneath the bed. He lay right there until Monday morning and talk about snoring! The little feller was worn to a frazzle. But just think about how tired you would be after riding in the floor of a moving vehicle all the way from St. Louis to Corning.

Anway, we had a great time and I’m sort of like Beverly… I’m glad we missed the craft show and did something different