Tonight I decided to go try getting new glasses (since I managed to step on my old ones just a couple days before moving to Texas and haven’t had a chance to get new ones since). I found a LensCrafters at, of all places, the infamous Arboretum mall<\/strong> that had so dashed my hopes of there being an actual arboretum in Austin. Seemed simple enough — it was at the intersection of two major highways, and how hard could it be to find a massive mall? Answer: really hard. I got off the highway at the right exit and couldn’t find it! There were no signs or other indications of it, and so I drove for a bit to where I thought it ought to be. I found myself in a maze of strip-malls. Turns out the Arboretum isn’t an inside mall like we have up north, but rather a bazillion stores with attached parking lots seemingly randomly strewn about. And there were some signs saying Store X is this way and Store Y is that way, but they were small and not lit, so I couldn’t read them without stopping in the middle of the road. I eventually called Ben who looked up the mall online and got me there. Where I found out that Texas law prohibits fulfilling glasses prescriptions more than a year old. (Which mine is by a couple months.) And the optometrist had already gone home for the evening. Big Sigh. So then I had to try to figure out how to get out of the mall. So I turned around and went back the way I came. But that doesn’t work here. There are so many one ways and access roads and divided highways that you can’t just go back the way you came. I eventually had to make a couple U-turns (which are totally standard here — I have to make two every day to get Sean to daycare) and traverse a random unmarked road to get back to a highway. Except I decided not to get on the highway because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get off again. That, it turns out, was the right decision. I followed the horrible access roads back home, which was the correct way to navigate this intersection: I would like to point out that this is just the intersection of two highways. A simple clover-leaf would do the trick anywhere else. But not here. It’s those awful access roads, I think. Blah.<\/p>\n <\/rant><\/p>\n And now for the mandatory cute Sean picture.<\/p>\n \n
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