Labor Day Weekend

A couple I am close friends with have been doing Labor Day weekend various places in Texas for a number of years with a group of other friends. This year they decided to go to stay at a campground on Lake Buchanan, right next to the dam, and they invited me to join them. A couple months ago, I rode with Jimmy and Eddie to check the place out and it was pretty nice, so they reserved an RV spot and a cabin.
I had dropped my Fat Boy off at the Harley shop for its 70,000 mile service and asked for it to be done on Thursday, giving me plenty of time to get ready to go to the dam Friday after work. I went to the shop Thursday after work and it wasn't even close to being done, and they promised it would be done the next morning. I left my office about 4:30 Friday afternoon to pick it up and it still wasn't ready. It was 6pm by the time I was checked out and ready to leave. Since I was way behind what I had been hoping for, I left my car at the shop and took off for Buchanan. Leaving from the shop instead of my office, I took a route that brought me through a terrible bottleneck of traffic. I ran into rain in Marble Falls, so I stopped and put on my rain gear. Traffic was slow in town, but once I got through it the rain stopped. I met up with two of the couples at a Mexican restaurant down the road from the campground. When we left it was raining, so we all put our rain suits on for the short trip back the campground.
After a night of waking up every couple hours to try to find a comfortable position on the couch of Eddie's motor home, I got up for good around 7 when Eddie got up. We didn't actually leave for breakfast until almost 9:30 and I was hungry. After breakfast we went by Dave's mom's house to get some goodies. From there, we went to Longhorn Caverns for a tour. The cave is nice, but not a lot of drip formations, mostly interesting passages, and some crystals. It's kind of sad that they blocked most of the entrances and the bat population that was once in the millions is now almost nonexistent. Also, when the cave was developed, they broke the faces off most of the crystals so they look pretty but totally unnatural. We went back to the campground and went for a swim in their really nice pool, which is basically carved out of the rock. Once I dried off and got dressed again, I left the rest of the group to go to San Antonio for a Slayer concert. I got to my seat right at 7, just as Bleeding Through was starting. They were pretty good. I was surprised but kind of glad that Slayer was playing before Manson. The set change didn't take long and Slayer was on kicking ass. They put on an awesome show, I had a really great seat in section 104. When they started "South of Heaven," two sets of speakers arranged in an upside down cross pattern lowered from above, and from there they went into "Raining Blood." They finished up about 9:15, I would have loved much more. The set change for Manson took ages. The PA music was pretty good, most people liked when Pantera's "Walk" came on. It was 10 when they cut the music and house lights, but nothing happened for a couple minutes, and then they played prerecorded music for at least 5 minutes. After 4 songs, I decided that was enough for me and I started making my way out. I took my time walking out, and had to rearrange some things on the bike before leaving. I got home about midnight despite being pulled over by a state trooper and given a warning.
Sunday morning I woke up about 7, had breakfast and rode my bicycle to the Harley shop to get my car, which took about 25 minutes. I drove back home, showered, dressed and left on my bike about 9am, rode straight to the campground and arrived about 10:20. The rest of the group got back from breakfast about 20 minutes later. Jimmy's friend Joe showed up with his pontoon boat to give us a ride not long after that. After getting changed and ready for the ride, we all boarded (including Buddy the dog) and set off to laze about on the lake. We just rode around, drinking beer, snacking, jumped in the water a couple times, looked at some of the fancy houses, and not doing much of anything. It was overcast so we weren't roasting and we didn't get rained on. We got back to the campsite about 4 and started getting ready to cook burgers and hang out. Jimmy went back to Joe's, then they drove to camp with Joe's wife. We stayed up too late and had too many beers.
I woke up kind of hung over in the morning, had a couple Advil and started moving. Everyone packed up before heading to breakfast. After breakfast we went our separate ways, me following Jimmy. We took some back roads and wound up on Hamilton Pool road. The water had gone down and the silt cleared, so we made it across the Pedernales just fine. I got home about 1 and started watching qualifying from Indy and napped for a while. It started raining in the afternoon so I didn't go rollerblading and just watched drag racing all afternoon. I started falling asleep again about 9 and finally gave up and went to bed at 10.