Scrap Girl

I finished the vacation scrapbook gift I made for my in-laws for Christmas.  My favorite story from that trip that is in their album is about our day trip to Galveston, Texas.  We (his mom and dad and myself) all went to Houston to see my husband in the National Truck Driving Championships.  One day he had to compete behind the scenes and we couldn’t see him all day so the three of us took a day trip to Galveston.  Once our rented PT Cruiser got us there we stopped on one end of Galveston Island just to explore that beach and I wanted to see what kind of boats and ships were coming in.  The tide had gone back out and there were all kinds of shells that had washed up.  I noticed some had tiny footprints in the sand around them and after picking one up saw that there were tiny crab creatures in these shells.  Okay, we’re talking hundreds, probably, of these shells.  I told my in-laws I’d  like to bring some shells back for my girls, but we had to make sure they were inhabited with no crabs.  I found some flatter shells and my mother-in-law was also gathering.  As we were walking back to the car, I felt a tiny crab leg tickle my hand, and there was one in this shell.  So I left all of my shells of that type on the beach, to not chance it.  We put the shells in a bag she had and went about our sightseeing.

At the end of the day we were in the car headed out of Galveston back to Houston in rush hour traffic and my mother-in-law says, “We have to stop!”  I’m driving the car in traffic and have to return the car in 45 minutes.  We asked why we had to stop and then she told us there were two crabs in the bag.  I told her “Sorry, we can’t stop.”  First of all I couldn’t exit the road we were on in that traffic, and we were on a timeline.  She wanted to take them back to the beach.   About that time, my father-in-law sees we are about to go over a bridge and says, “Give them to me, we can throw them over the bridge and back to the water.”  She decided we couldn’t do that.  I told her we didn’t have time to go back to the beach and I would put them in the bathtub when we got back to the hotel until I figured out what to do with them.   In the meantime, I’m thinking okay, we’ll get back to Houston about 5:00 pm, I have to get back across town to the hotel, and I have to get ready to go to a dinner at 6:00pm.  So we get back to the hotel and I tell my husband his mother brought back two crabs from the beach, throw them in the bathtub after I get out of the shower.  Get this–So–it turns out there are six crabs in six shells in my bathtub at the Hilton when I leave for dinner.  So the crabs in my bathtub are the talk of dinner and everybody got a good laugh.  Unfortunately, my crab friends didn’t make it after a couple days without salt water.

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