Road trip! First night in Fairhope

I finally got to Gail's at 9:30. She had made a salad and cooked steaks, and had made an extra for me. She said it was no problem that I was late, that she didn't have to get up at her usual 6am the next day. We visited for a while, and she showed me her new laptop. She's just recently taken the plunge with computers and the Internet, and everyone else in the family gets to tell stories about how funny she is about it. She was trying to get her wireless router hooked up, so we set out to get it working that night.

After half an hour of reading the router's manual and hooking things up, followed by another half-hour on the phone with tech support, we got it working. As I was talking her through what the tech guy was saying to me, I told her to click on Internet Explorer. She clicked once, waited two seconds, and when nothing happened, she clicked on it five more times. We watched as, over the next twenty seconds, six IE windows popped up. Apart from that, though, she didn't seem to have any trouble with it. Only those of us who know Gail understand how proud we all are of her.

Between setting up wireless and just talking, we stayed up until 12:30. I spent the night at her place, and slept in the smaller of her guest beds. Whenever my mom, sister, or I visit Gail, we deliberately choose that one over the larger and cushier guest bed she has. Gail loaned Mom and Dad the little bed when Heather and I were kids: it was the first bed I had after outgrowing cribs, and the same happened with Heather. I finally got to sleep at around 1, after a good bit of lying awake and reminiscing.

Gail takes care of pets for a living. She boards animals at her house--smaller ones in her kitchen with her dogs, larger ones in kennels in her nearby barn--and also makes house calls. Fairhope has a fair number of wealthy retirees, and their frequent vacations ensure demand for Gail's work.

She loves all animals. While she only owns dogs now, she's had many other kinds of animals at one time or another. She used to have chickens and horses.* ** She also had two dobermans named Leia and Punky Brewster. *** She's also had a goat (named Broom-hilda), and some cats. She especially loves dogs, and her favorite breed is the Yorkshire terrier. She's owned several, and, the last time I checked, has five: Maggie, Glory, Fern, Lily-Rose, and Melanie. ****

She has about four acres well off the beaten path, about half an hour from Fairhope, which is itself an hour from Mobile proper. She and her neighbors live on a dirt road that hasn't changed much for as long as I've been around to see it. She has a very nice trailer with a fenced-in garden and small pond. Near the trailer is the barn, which easily dwarfs her trailer. It has an air-conditioned room with kennels for her smaller clients. There's also small fenced-in yard for the boarding dogs to get out and play.

In front of the barn is a large pond, created a few years ago and stocked with fish. Thanks mostly to hurricanes over the years--such as Erin, Opal, and Ivan--her yard has been pretty well cleared of trees, leaving a huge plot of grass.

*In fact, one of my first Christmas presents from her was a saddle. At least, that's what she and her husband put under the Christmas tree for me. I couldn't have been more than 4, and the way everybody tells it, I was upset when I saw the huge piece of leather with my name on it. The horse was out in the yard--they had carried him in a trailer for the hour-long drive to our house--and I named him Tiny. Mom and Dad didn't quite have enough acreage in suburban Pensacola, Florida to support a horse, so Gail and Bill kept him for me. I got to visit a couple of times, but eventually they gave him to a local family who had enough pasture for Tiny to be happy. Dad still likes to joke that they sent Tiny to the glue factory.

**Also, a Christmas or two later, when we lived in Fort Walton Beach on waterfront property, Gail and Bill gave me a four mallard ducks. I named them Scrooge, Huey, Dewey, and Louie. They were awesome, until they got eaten by raccoons.

***They gave one of Leia's puppies to my aunt Sherry and uncle Reed, who named the puppy Chewbacca. Ain't my family great?

****Melanie is her newest, adopted from a local family. Fern and Lily-Rose are Maggie's daughters; Maggie and Glory are sisters. Maggie and Glory's mother, Nugget, passed away last year; before that, Fern or Lily-Rose (I can't remember which) had puppies, meaning for a short time, Gail had four generations of Yorkies in her house.