Sisterchicks on the Loose Read Online Free

went on a Caribbean cruise, but when she boarded the plane, she tried to heave her heavy luggage into the overhead bin and threw her back out. When they landed in San Juan, the paramedics had to wheel her from the plane on a gurney. She spent the week of her cruise lying in a Puerto Rican hospital.
    Sufficiently motivated by her story, I drove around my neighborhood, measured a mile and a half on the odometer, then turned around and drove home. That became the three-mile course I walked every morning after the kids went to school.
    Inspired by my determination, Penny bought some ankle weights and walked around her suburban San Francisco neighborhood. However, she outdid me by walking four miles every day and going on one of her protein shake diets.
    “Have you lost any weight yet?” I asked Penny six days into her diet.
    “Not yet. But I will. I need to. This always has worked before. It’s just taking longer this time. I guess I have more weight to lose.”
    Penny and I were the same height and basically the same size. Her waistline was lower than mine, and she was larger on top. Over the years we shared maternity clothes and watched each other expand and shrink at different paces.
    Penny’s biggest complaint after she turned forty was the effect of gravity. She said she believed that putting a man on the moon had to be a hoax because gravity was, in fact, an irrefutable law. Things go down, not up. If any of the NASA scientists wanted to challenge her facts, she said she had secret evidence up her sleeve.
    I didn’t particularly like my size or the effect of gravityeither, but until this trip I guess I thought what was happening to my body was inevitable. Even if we never boarded a plane or hoisted luggage into an overhead bin, I liked the way I felt after I walked. That bit of motivation in my normally sedate life was worth the price of the tour book and passport—the passport that still hadn’t arrived by February 6.
    Penny called on the evening of the sixth to tell me her passport had arrived and she was sending me a tour book on Scandinavia that she had bought.
    I asked why she was sending the book to me instead of gleaning the desired information herself.
    “I don’t have time to read it,” she said. “This is supposed to be the slow time of year for real estate, but it’s been wild around here. I might have another house in Moraga sold before we leave.”
    “That’s great, Penny.”
    “I know. God must be providing us with extra souvenir money or something. I can’t believe this year is off to such a great start.”
    I tried to image what life would be like with “extra souvenir money.”
    “I hope you’re taking notes as you’re going over the tour books,” Penny said.
    “I am.”
    “Good. Anything interesting yet?”
    “Did you know more saunas are in Finland than cars?”
    “Seriously?”
    “According to the tour book the ratio is one sauna to every five people.”
    “Now that’s useful information.” I could hear Penny running the water in the kitchen sink. “Do you think you and I aregoing to upset the Finnish national sauna ratio when we show up and add two more people to the population for a week?”
    “Finland isn’t as insignificant as you think. You really should read this book, Penny. Finland is the only country that has ever fully repaid the U.S. for a debt.”
    “A debt?”
    “We loaned them a lot of money after World War II.”
    “Sharon?” Penny had turned off the water, and her voice grew low. “You do realize, don’t you, that this is supposed to be a
fun
trip, not a
field
trip? Immigration personnel will not make us take a test before we can enter their fine country.”
    “Very funny.”
    “What about fun places to shop? Tell me you marked those in the book, too.”
    “I have them all marked. Restaurants, too. I don’t think you need to send me the other book.”
    “Okay. I might toss it in my suitcase, if there’s room. All we have to do now is wait for