A Necessary Trip

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Because of school and my spine problems, Mark and I have gone on Zero fun trips this summer. It made for a boring Instagram feed.
Fortunately, my car registration and vehicle inspection expired 3 days ago, and it forced our hand into a trip.
No, we did not do anything illegal.
So now that you are not accomplices, how, you may ask, does vehicle registration have anything to do with fun trips?
Strangely, the answer is: car repairs.

A month or two ago, for a reason that I don't remember (I was otherwise occupied with back problems, if you recall), Mark took my car in to get its struts replaced. Unfortunately, that led to my Anti-Lock Braking System malfunctioning, which led to 2 more trips to the mechanic last month. Because we had to wait for ordered car parts to arrive, that meant that my car finally got released from the car 'clinic' on the 2nd-to-last day of August. The very next day, I took my car in to get inspected.
It failed.
The mechanic must have disconnected the car battery, which clears the car computer system of any warning codes, which doesn't let the car pass inspection if the car hasn't traveled far enough to verify that yes, indeed, there are no warning codes when the car is in use.
So that tasked us with finding somewhere to go to that would log 100 miles on my car.

I spent the afternoon looking up fun things to do 30-50 miles away, and Mark chose the winner: Brazos Bend State Park.

I probably should have warned him that 20-odd years ago, some Utah relatives came to visit my family, and my dad took them to Brazos Bend State Park (known for alligators), and those relatives never visited us again because they had nightmares about the spiders.
Spider is on right, middle row, between the 2 main light splotches

Their leg span is about the size of my hand

My phone didn't know what to focus on. Apologies.


Oops.

We touched a baby alligator (held by a ranger), saw some teenage alligators out in the wild, and checked out the observatory. We wandered around the park for about 2 miles, and then Mark was all done ducking to avoid running into spider webs with their lethal-looking occupants. [at one point, there were 4 spider webs back-to-back-to-back. that was probably the triggering event to our exit].
the marsh


The important thing is, I can get my car inspected now.

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