Mall Weather

If you are vacationing at a beach area in August, perhaps have rented a house for a week, what do you do when you wake up to a sixty degree morning with rain dripping from leaden skies and the forecast is that it will rain all day and remain unseasonably cool? You didn't come to go to museums and the ones available are too small to take more than an hour. You don't want to read that book you bought for the beach. If you have kids they will be whining with disappointment by 9:00. What do you do?

What any normal American would do. You go to the mall. The mall has a multiplex, it has a food court, it has a lot of stores which have clearances of summer clothes -- which you don't want because it will soon be back to school/work time. But at least you can eat and wander around and catch one of those "family fun" August movie releases.

I made the really dumb mistake of getting fed up with the gray and decided to go to a movie at the mall. I knew there would be tourists there but I was just as bored as they -- in fact more because at least 60% of the days this summer have been like this -- I think it's closer to 75% but that may not be true. Parking was almost impossible. I'm sure that the week before Christmas can't be a crowded as the parking lot was today. Once I parked very distant from the mutliplex and splashed through a few puddled in the parking lot I found such a line of people and so many kids being restless and noisy that I gave up. When in to find a magazine at Barnes & Noble, which they didn't have, nor did they have any place to sit if I indulged in a Starbucks coffee, so I didn't. So it was not a happy day. I wonder if there really is a sun somewhere above those clouds ...