Wild Weekend!

Well another busy weekend here at Hooligan C. We'd been looking forward to a brief visit from our good friend Darryl from Nevada who had to be in the area for a work meeting. Mark was to pick him up at Burbank airport at 1:30 Sat. afternoon. Mom and Dad Carson woke us up Sat. morning about 8 on the phone, alerting us to a fire raging in the valley just to the south of us. A fire that had literally shut down ALL the freeways and roads going directly south. Burbank is a happy little drive of only 30 min south on a normal Sat. This obviously was not going to be a normal Saturday. We got up, and I hopped online to get the scoop, and discovered that the only way to get south to Burbank was to take the highway that goes west all the way to the coast, then pick up the freeway that goes back east. AND, this being literally the only route around the fire, EVERYONE was on that highway. So poor Mark left at 9:30, endured stop and go traffic all the way, and got to the airport right on time (egads, 4 hrs!!). A normally 1:00 there and back trip turned into an almost 7 hr marathon! While he was gone, I had to run a few errands, so got some pics of the smoke. The wind was just whipping, and in the space of 10 or 15 min, the smoke went from looking like this:



to looking like this:


and this: Yikes!


Most of the smoke had cleared away by the end of the day, but the fire did creep over the mts. toward our valley, and I'm told that some back fires were lit on our side as well. Whatever the case, both last night and tonight there were lines of flame visible on the mts. after dark. Ben was a bit unnerved watching the flames, but they were far enough away, and the wind died down quite a bit today. All freeways reopened by this morning. Anyway, we had a nice-but-short visit with Darryl. He (as usual) wined and dined us, and we went mini golfing at a new place that has indoor black lighting. It has an underwater theme, and everything glows. Ben and Mark had checked out this place previously, and Ben was beside himself to go, being a self proclaimed connoisseur of miniature golf!


The hooligan sisters don't quite share their dear brothers enthusiasm for miniature golfing......

......but don't be fooled....they had a great time anyway! I took some pics with regular flash, but I also tried some with no flash so I could capture the "coolness" of the black lighting. It worked pretty well, but it was hard to get a picture that wasn't blurry. Oh well.

THE FLOOR (OOH AAH)

DARRYL AND MARK

Cool, huh?

So we had a fun time golfing, and today he took us to Hometown Buffet for lunch, which is a special treat for the kids because it is totally out of our normal price range for eating out. They love going there! Darryl left at about 3:30 this afternoon. The couple that run the company D works for picked him up. He'll have meetings for a couple days, then fly home. Back to normal life tomorrow.