Good Times with Old Friends

When you live on the road you meet a lot of new and interesting people, but there's no comparison to the joy in seeing an old friend.

When you've known someone over forty years you can converse in a sort of verbal shorthand, even if you haven't seen each other for a year.  It's so comforting.



We started our day with peach and blueberry power smoothies at Panera and then moved on to lunch at Big Bowl.  Coming to visit her exposed me to another whole area of the Twin Cities I was not familiar with.  But it was hard to believe there was no Barnes & Noble in this huge mall.

We've generally centered our June outings with plant shopping, something neither of us need to do any more since they live on the road as well.  But there were often forays into book stores in the past and wanting to keep the tradition alive, we went to find a Barnes & Noble.

She immediately stopped at the magazine counter, a major weakness of hers and I went off to pursue the book I had my mind on.  After checking with the customer service I found they didn't carry it, so knowing she'd be a while, I wandered off to the cookbook section to find some sort of miracle for my Paleo bread failures.

Pretty soon there she was, with magazines in hand and shaking her head.  She still has a hard time believing that there would come a day that I'd be enamored of cooking.  She's always been my emergency source of information such as calls asking where to find eggplant in the store and my having to listen to her roar with laughter when I admitted I had been looking in the milk and egg section.  She's taught me so much since then.

Now that I'm starting to use fresh herbs she's still my go to for questions as to what to do with this hunk of weed I just paid a fortune for.  Do I strip the leaves off the basil or chop it up, those stems are awfully tough.  Answer was to strip the leaves.

It was her that spotted the perfect book for my baking needs and as I hugged it to my chest I knew that it would always hold the memory of being together every time I used it.  That and if the recipes really stunk I could blame her for finding it.  Yeah, our friendship is like that.

Another part of our connecting usually involved a stop for some sort of decadent ice cream treat.  But I was going to be a good girl and no Coldstone for this Paleo no sireee.  I did real good until I was just about to turn into the motel where they were spending the night when the car suddenly swerved over and we found ourselves in front of a frozen yogurt place.  And it was gluten and fat free yogurt to boot!  Oh happy days.  Now our trip was a complete success.

So once again we hugged each other goodbye, not knowing when we might see each other again, but knowing that time and distance cannot break our bond.

I was getting all nostalgic when she reminded me I was coming back to La Crosse in late July for a doctors visit and we had already arranged to have lunch.  So it won't be such a long time before our next visit...and that's a really good thing.

Long Live the Queen