On Friday, darling daughter and I headed over to Charlotte, NC for the Dance Makers Inc dance competition/ convention and on the way we got lost because MapQuest wasn’t quite up to date. We were supposed to merge from the right onto 49 but there was no merge so I turned right instead. We drove and drove and realized the turn off we needed was not anywhere to be found so we turned around. We got back onto 73 thinking maybe the merge was further along the road even though 49 was right there. (I figured out later that I should have turned left onto the road.) Anyway, I stopped at a gas station and the attendant was super nice as she tried to explain how to get where we were going. Because the directions involved turning at certain landmarks instead of street names, I ended up stopping at another gas station to make sure I was on the right path. Again, the attendant was very nice, so was the poor customer who said he had just come from the street we were looking for and that it was just a mile or so away. Woo hoo! The attendant looked at the directions I had and said there was an even easier way of getting to our hotel and mentally tabulated the number of red lights between the gas station and our turn off. I ended up following the MapQuest directions once we got back on the right road, even though there was another minor mistake that was easily corrected.

Darling daughter had her first dance that afternoon and they girls did well. She was supposed to get a good night’s rest because they were going to be meeting at 7:10 IN THE MORNING for a full day of dance classes. She crashed hard at 8:30 and woke up at 10:00 under the mistaken belief she had slept through the night. When she discovered it had only been an hour and a half she was seriously shocked and spent the rest of the night trying to go back to sleep. But Saturday came and she got up and did all of the classes taught by some amazing dancers and in the evening she danced her second of her two dances. The third dance – her tap trio – didn’t happen because the third member of her group up and quit two weeks ago and there wasn’t time to rearrange it for two tappers. 😦 She had one more day of convention and dancing on Sunday, dancing all day followed by the wrap up ceremony and a trip to Ikea. It was a good weekend and she is looking forward to going back next year. It was a great birthday weekend for her (today’s her birthday and we’re grilling steak for her.)