My dear daughter talked me into to doing the black Friday thing. So she brought 2 friends and I begged my friend lynn to join us for our adventure. The most difficult thing was trying to stay up until midnight after eating our big turkey dinner and laying around the house watching football on Thursday.
Our adventure began at the midnight outlet mall extravaganza. As we approach the mall on I35, we see streams of cars lined up to get into the parking lot...made me think of that long line we always wait in to go to the trail of lights. I'm thinking...hmmm...where is my cozy bed? We enter the parking lot and we quickly see that it will be much like a crap shoot to get a parking spot. We see people already heading back out to their cars, smiling with bags in hand obviously happy with their doorbuster prizes. So we decide to drop the girls off and continue the hunt for a parking space. We quickly thought of other things to do while they shopped...is there a Starbucks open?, let's just pull over and nap, what restaurants are open? But of course we decide, why should they have all the fun! We laughed hysterically many times as we would see a space, rush to the next aisle only to see another car waiting with their blinker on. So then we resort to the "following anyone walking with bags to their car" method which resulted in people waving their fingers at us and mouthing "we aren't leaving" or to us naming each group of shoppers "where is that boot lady" (she was wearing boots) or "follow the three stooges" (3 innocent guys walking to their car:) Now we are all the way out by the movie theatre and about to give it up when we pass a row and Lynn yells..."there's one!!" So I swiftly put the car in reverse (she only had a mild case of whiplash) and zoom to the open spot and see that there are actually 2 spots so the guy behind me was thrilled! They get out of their car and I hear the guy yell "SUCCESS!" and we are all laughing and thinking "what the heck are we doing here."
The girls found some great bargains and we found a few. Sadly there were at least 4 stores that were going out of business so the sales were plentiful. We continue to be dumbfounded as we see all these people shopping in the middle of the night and finally at 3am our stomachs are growling so we finish up the bargain hunting and advance to the only place open at 3am in Round Rock...IHop.
Our amazement continues as we have to wait 15 minutes for a table and see couples with little babies (maybe they were up in the middle of the night anyway) and big groups of people. After all this we decide, well it's already 4:45 and Target opens in 15 minutes (so I thought). So we drive to Target (there were 3 things there that I really wanted) and it doesn't open until 6am so Kelsie says, "Well let's just go to Kohl's until Target opens." I'm thinking oh to be young and full of energy again. So we continue with the plan and I found a digital frame for my dh's office and so we continued on to Target. I tell the girls there are just 3 things that I want to buy, it shouldn't take long. I find my treasures, checked out with no waiting and then call Kelsie to tell her to come up front. She says, "Oh we went back out to the car" where I find them laid out across the seats. It was a fun and crazy night, but not sure I'd do it again. The older I get, the longer it takes me to get over those all-nighters:)
But the funniest thing about it all is that for the major gifts that we're getting for the kids, we found the best deals online and shopped in our jammies from home:)))) That's my kind of shopping!
