labyrinth

i love the movie labryinth. it's got great music, wicked computer animated owls, and david bowie.who doesn't enjoy such dialogue as: "you remind me of the babe." "what babe?" "the babe with the power." "what power?" "the power of voodoo." "who do?" "you do." "do what?" "remind me of the babe..." today, houston was my labyrinth, only without great music, wicked computer animated owls and david bowie. and the dialogue wasn't that clever...

we left for church, as usual, with 10 minutes to do a 20 minute drive. as we backed out of our parking spot, i noticed that a police car was blocking the entrance to montrose (a road perpendicular to ours). then i noticed a crowd of people running. that's when i remembered someone at church last week saying that it was the houston marathon today. at first we weren't bothered since we were headed the other way, but at 8:58 am we were stuck. the road we always go on was blocked. so we turned and tried to go around. we drove around residential roads for about 30 minutes before we realize that there was no going around, we were completely enclosed in the marathon. we got more and more frazzled as we tried backtracking; we couldn't go back the way we came, because they had blocked off the other side of the road. the girls were getting fussy, hazel wanted to get to nursery for the bubbles and snacks, and poor lucy still hadn't had her bottle (we usually feed her once we get to church). finally we were able to get on one freeway, then merge onto another and exit onto a road that we recognized. we snuck in only 45 minutes late. as we sit down, grant goes to make lucy's bottle. well, in the rush to leave, grant filled up the formula divider, but forgot to put it in the bag. oops. we decide to put hazel into nursery, i go to sunday school with lucy, and grant drives home to get the formula. long story....a little less long, grant comes back after being gone 45+ minutes and says that he wasn't able to get home. so we just decide to head home and hope we make it in less than an hour. lucy, amazingly, was barely fussing, even though it had now been about 14 hours since she had last eaten. luckily, because of our awesome map skills, we made it home is under 30 minutes.

take a look at the course map , (you have to click on the 'courses' box and then on the 'chevron houston marathon' box to see the full marathon course, in red) we live just above the 59 and right inside montrose/the big loop, our church meets just south of the furthest tip of the loop to the west, on bering. i want to know, who plans a marathon in a loop? why couldn't they post detour signs?