Worst Vacation of My Life (So Far) - Part Three

Again, we did a great job waking up and eating breakfast. One the road by 7:00 again, we were nearing the western end of Rio Grande County when we reached a highway closure because of an accident. The federal highway was being diverted onto three miles of county-maintained dirt roads. As semi trucks and RVs tried to pass each other, the detour was itself blocked by a cattle drive. I don’t blame the cattlemen, who probably were expecting a car or two, not a diverted highway-full of traffic. Our family enjoyed seeing actual horse-mounted cowboys (the last cowboys I saw were ATV-mounted in New Mexico) driving cattle right next to our car.
Once back on the highway, we continued on through a county that many consider the most difficult to reach in the lower 48 states: Hinsdale County, Colorado. It’s such a challenge because there’s really no reason at all to go there or go through there unless you are meaning to do specifically that.
To get there we went through Creede, Colorado, which I thought was one of the most beautiful parts of the state. However, it was while driving through Creede that we had the misfortune to start listening to Judy Blume’s Superfudge.
I normally like Judy Blume. I will forever be grateful for what her book Wifey did for me when I was a teenaged boy. But the Peter Hatcher character is unforgiveable. He’s a jerk to his brother Fudge, sure, but he’s also a jerk to his parents for having another child, a jerk to his dad for moving the family to Princeton, a jerk to his mom for wanting to go back to school, a jerk to his friend from New York and his new friend from Princeton, and yet for some reason thinks some eight-foot-tall Amazon in his new class is going to like him. When I was a kid and read these books, I was focused on Fudge, so I was surprised to find out this time that he wasn’t even the main character. It was all Peter, all the time, and Peter was a jerk. When we finally finished the book I declared we would not be listening to Fudge-A-Mania.
Coming down from Slumgullion Pass, our brakes got weak and I could smell them, so we pulled over at a bathroom halfway down to let them cool off. (It is a 10-percent grade, which is the steepest I’ve ever driven on.) We had a nice view of the Slumgullion Flow, a still-active, slow-moving landslide. Continuing on, we used first gear all the way to the bottom.
We made another stop at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. This stop had been planned. Persephone likes when we have something to do in the middle of our driving days so we don’t spend 10 straight hours in the car. At Black Canyon we discovered the junior ranger program, which our kids loved because they got badges. (Joe loves wearing badges, and even brought his Douglas County Junior Sheriff badge with him on our trip. Jane just loves free things because she’s a packrat.) What they DIDN’T love, though, was having to interact with another adult, as both refused to say their oath. In the visitor center I saw a stuffed yellow-bellied marmot. It looked like a big tan beaver with no tail. I thought of the line from “The Big Lebowski,” but hardly made a note of it. What does or does not constitute a yellow-bellied marmot ended up being one of the main controversies of our vacation.
It had been so long since we left Topeka that reaching Grand Junction made it seem like we were in the Big City. (We weren’t, though; we were in some dry western craphole. But it SEEMED like the Big City.) We continued on into Utah, where I had a run-in with the town of Green River. I remembered Green River actually being more than a flyspeck. When we approached the first exit and were completely unimpressed with our dinner options, we went on. The second exit was no bigger, but I was reasonably certain there were options at the US-6 interchange. I was wrong. We had to turn around and go back, since it was 110 miles to Salina, Utah, with no services between.
Don’t let my reticence to lambast my children fool you: they were a pack of jackals. If Noel Gallagher had a baby with Amy Winehouse and then sent the aforementioned spawn to a finishing school deaned by Satan himself, that child would be more of a pleasurable companion for long-distance auto travel than my children. Jerome spent several hours at a clip screaming, demanding everything the other two kids had in their hands with his mantra, “Ma ma ma ma ma!” Jane and Joe complained of boredom, always needing “something to do.” When I reminded them that, at five years old, I had made the drive from Ohio to Utah and back with nothing more than a hand-held mechanized (not electronic) Pac-Man game, they blinked blindly and then asked if they could open another present. (Persephone got the idea from a friend to bring presents to open along the way to make things not so boring. Here’s how that panned out: hours of demanding the next present, opening said present, tossing it aside because it’s boring, and beginning the cycle anew.) Finally, nearing Richfield, Utah, when Jane said, “What does anyone have for me to do?” I yelled, “What does anyone have for ME to do? I’ve been driving a car for three days!”
Once we were on US-89 we thought it would satisfy them if we told them we were really close. Joe asked, “Where’s Grandma and Grandpa’s cabin?” I’d point in the approximate direction and then he would ask, “Then why are we not going that way?” I’d say, “Do you see a road that goes that way?” Five minutes later we would complete this dance again.
Finally we reached the first of the three gates between the county road and the cabin. We had to park our car just inside this gate, since the roads further on were impassible for anything other than a four-wheel-drive SUV. This added feature heightened the cabin fever by making us into virtual prisoners, while making unloading and reloading our car a delightful challenge.

Worst Vacation of My Life (So Far) - Part Two

The first day we left town in the early afternoon and made a stop at the Topeka Library. Jerome Jerome the Metronome was already screaming about everything, while Crazy Jane and Articulate Joe were already claiming terminal boredom. I should have known to turn the car around when the Super Baby billboard, which is usually the highlight of a trip to Topeka, only elicited yawns.

We scoured the library for books, since Crazy Jane reads voraciously and then gets surly when she’s out of material. Persephone hid library books in our luggage for periodic surprises, but that just made Jane insist, “I need to get out another library book now!” She started in on one book as soon as she took it off the shelf and, by the time we finished our browsing, checked out, and changed Jerome’s pants, she had finished it. As we drove out of the parking lot I asked if we should return it in the book drop we were driving past.

My plan was to be in Hays, Kansas, by 3:30. Instead, we stopped for dinner at an IHOP in Salina at 5:00. There were two parties of old people who were just finishing their meal, and us. The rest of the place was empty. Things were so slow that they had TWO greeters. We placed our order and then waited forever for our food. Twenty minutes later a tour bus pulled up and the workers went into pandemonium. There were still at least 100 empty seats. Jerome figured out how to escape a restaurant high chair. We were back on the road two hours later, finally reaching Hays after 8:00.

I took the older kids swimming while Persephone tried to get Jerome asleep. After a lengthy swim, showers, and watching the end of a baseball game on television, Jerome wasn’t asleep and the other two kids thought “Don’t say another word for the rest of the night” was merely life advice to be disregarded as soon as necessary. I took them down to the lobby and read their books to them (Forecasting the Weather for Joe, and Anne of Green Gables for Jane) until nearly midnight, when Jerome was finally asleep.

Things got better the next morning, sort of like how Han rescues Luke in the middle of The Empire Strikes Back, relieving some of the buzz-harshing while paradoxically enhancing the harshing to come. We were up by 6:00, at breakfast by 6:30, and out the door by 7:00. And since we were heading west, we were gaining an hour when, a little later in the day, we passed from Central Time to Mountain Time. Things also got much better (for me, at least) when I started getting new counties.

We spent the morning driving through rural western Kansas, listening to Laura Linney’s reading of the Nancy Drew book, The Bungalow Mystery. (The bungalow has only a tenuous connection to the plot. If I were the Stratemeyer fellow who ran the whole production, I would have called it, The Mysterious Guardians.) We drove through Two Buttes, Colorado, where Persephone killed my plan to have us stand next to the town sign, mooning the camera (the great thing about extremely rural places is the myriad opportunities for spontaneous nudity), despite the fact that she’s never mooned a camera before in her life. (The same cannot be said of me.)

After a lunchtime experience with some Amish at the McDonald’s in La Junta, Colorado, we drove on. When we finally saw mountains, near Walsenburg, our kids were sufficiently impressed. Jane said of the Spanish Peaks, “The look like they’re made out of plastic,” and Joe said, “That’s the hugest mountain ever!”

We stopped at Great Sand Dunes National Park. It wasn’t part of our plan, but we had made good time all day and had several hours until sunset yet. I had done some reading about Great Sand Dunes, and was aware that it was full of sand dunes, but not one thing I read made mention of the stream that runs between the access road and the sand dunes. Evidently I was the only one who didn’t get the memo, because most of the park visitors were in bathing suits, playing in the stream. We forded the stream and hiked on the dunes. Joe was unexpectedly ecstatic, leading the way towards the dune he wanted to climb and slide down.

Sliding didn’t work so well, so I rolled down, like every self-respecting Mormon has done at the Manti Temple. I got very dizzy and nearly puked, much to the delight of our kids.

Of course, we became unbelievably sandy. So much so that, three washes later, the clothes we were wearing still have sand in the pockets and cuffs. But we had a good time and we all got more stamps for our national parks passports. And I managed to beat the sand off our kids’ feet without scrubbing the skin off, which was something that happened so regularly when we frequented the beach as a child that I assumed it was a necessity. It turns out, it’s not necessary at all.

Things went downhill when we reached our hotel in Alamosa. Persephone was supposed to get Jerome asleep while I swam with the kids. But the hotel pool was small and had nearly no area under four-feet deep. On top of that there were, by actual count, 19 people in the pool: three adults and 16 kids. Half of the kids were busy incessantly jumping in the pool, creating splashes that the pool deck was not designed to handle, resulting in enormous puddles against every wall. Their adult proudly told the other, “They did this for an hour last night.” One of his kids didn’t know how to swim, so would sink to the bottom, push off with his feet to resurface, and repeat, slowly hopping his way to the stairs. Once out, he singled out a particular kid NOT FROM HIS GROUP and tried repeatedly to jump on that kid’s head. That is no hyperbole. He wasn’t merely trying to splash the other kid, or jumping really close for fright. He was jumping with his legs open, trying to land on the kid’s neck and ride him under the water. After enough dirty looks from me to his adult, the guy told the kind, “Garrett, not so close.” (If it weren’t for these kids and their negligent adults, the story of the pool would have been the woman in the bikini with the sagging stomach flab hanging over the waistband of her Budweiser-logo-bedazzled jean shorts.)

Later, while reading in the lobby to the older kids, the staff of the hotel was friendly, but a little TOO friendly. One woman asked if we needed anything. I said, “No, we’re just reading while our other kid falls asleep.” Five minutes later she came back and said, “The TV’s on in the dining area if the kids want to watch cartoons.” Did she think we were only reading because we didn’t know where to find a TV? Hotel TV is like crack to my kids, who are so TV-deprived, what with our lack of cable, that they happily watch infomercials at hotels. I got to incur their wrath by telling them that we were going to continue reading.

Worst Vacation of My Life (So Far) - Part One

I’ve written here before about the fact that my blog isn’t an Option 1 blog, so I’ve got to say nice things like, “Thanks for the awesome sweater, Aunt Loraine!” even though I don’t even have an Aunt Loraine, because one of my prying family members might come along and read the post and think, “He seems upset that he doesn’t have an Aunt Loraine. I think I should confront him with this observation, intervention-style!” (For those of you who think I don’t have prying family members, my father just became a Twitter follower of mine; and for those of you who disbelieve the piddling level of crap my family can turn into an intervention-style confrontation, I need only remind you of the question, “Is this your black thong?”)
JT recommended, in comment-form back then, and since then in face-to-face-form, that I ignore all my potential readers and just write what I want. At the time I dismissed his advice with a well-reasoned, “If he knows so much, why isn’t he a doctor?” Then I realized he IS a doctor, and now that I've become so enraged at all things familiar to me, I don’t care who I piss off. If they don’t like it, they can kiss my black ass.
I am not exaggerating when I say this past vacation was the worst I’ve ever been on. (Positive sidebar: that last sentence was the first time in my life I ever spelled the word “exaggerating” correctly on the first try. Usually it’s so mangled that SpellCheck can’t even help at first.) Everything about this vacation went wrong, in increasingly horrible ways, reaching a grand crescendo of crapulence when we spent an hour in a roadside ditch, listing 15 degrees to port.
Firstly, three years ago my work made me go to part-time instead of accommodating my school schedule, so all of my time off is unpaid. When everyone else gets a holiday, I have to work 10-hour days the rest of the week if I don’t want to pay money for the privilege of not working. That means that a two-week vacation is thousands of dollars more expensive for me than for the average person. So already I was in a position where every day needed to be pretty awesome to be worth its price.

Packing the night before we left, our parking space battle with the new neighbors came out in the open. We’ve lived in the same place for nearly four years now, and are on our fourth set of neighbors. The first set moved in after us. They were a childless married couple with two cars, and we had one car and two kids. They continually parked in the closest parking space, and other neighbors further west used the other spaces in that row, leaving us to load kids in an out of the car in the parking spaces that filled with rain and snow. Crazy Jane was the age to ask loud questions like, “Why are they parking in our space?” and I am the type to give loud answers like, “Because they don’t think of anyone but themselves.” They finally stopped parking in our space, and we never got along afterwards. The second set was two college girls who treated the spot as first-come-first-served, even though my wife had two little kids and was visibly pregnant. When the baby was born in the dead of winter and I spent an entire morning shoveling out the space for my wife and then one of them came home and took it, I went next door and asked them to stop. They were great about it and we got along well for the rest of their tenancy, even though for part of that time they owned an indoor goose. The third neighbor was a crazy lady who hung blackout drapes, tried to let herself into our place once because she was looking for her niece, and moved out suddenly one afternoon in the middle of the month. She fought us for the space at first, but after a few times saying hello to her, she grew frightened of us and started parking several spaces away. Now we have two guys who fight for the space more than anyone before them. Although we only have three weeks left as their neighbors, we have a lot of loading to do. Most of our packing (and unpacking) for this trip had to happen in the intermittent lakebed because they need to park 15 feet away from their front door.
Another thing that made packing horrible was the volume of stuff we had to take. Persephone’s sister is a bit of a clotheshorse (like Lenin was a bit of a radical) and has amassed a collection of children’s clothing not seen this side of Children’s Place factory explosion. Since she only has one daughter, she has been lending girl clothes to us as Crazy Jane’s been growing up. After nearly seven years of it, several boxes of it were on our hands. Persephone asked if we should move them with us in case we have another girl, or if she could sell them on eBay for her sister, possibly keeping some of the money for her troubles. Instead, her sister wanted them all back so she could give them away to friends. Therefore, the entire roof container was filled with borrowed girl clothes to return, so much so that, when tightening the straps, one of the clasps broke.

FAQ

In the interest of saving time (and precious oxygen), as well as sparing your feelings when you ask me an embarrassing question, I've decided to answer the questions that are presently on the tip of your tongue (if you used your tongue to type, which is sort of what Stephen Hawking does, right?).

Q: Are you available?

A: Alas, ladies (and open-minded dudes), I'm married.

Q: But do you at least play the field?

A: I'm sorry, but I'm what John Steinbeck termed "an all-married man."

Q: Okay, but let's just say your wife died somehow, right? Would you ever consider getting remarried?

A: I would want someone to take care of our kids, but I'd feel guilty about marrying anyone hot, and I'd always be afraid my dead wife would haunt the crap out of me for it, so I think I would immediately marry a Filipino housekeeper.

I hear wedding bells.

Q: Is it true that you're going on vacation for two weeks?
A: Why yes, that is true. Funny you should ask.

Q: You told me to ask that.
A: That wasn't in the form of a question.

Q: You told me to ask that?
A: What are you, a 15-year-old girl? Learn to speak with proper inflection.

Q: How many new counties are you going to get on this trip?
A: Twenty-nine.

Q: Do you keep track of the counties you and your wife have kissed in?
A: Yes, I keep track of a lot of things.

Q: What about the counties you've gotten it on in?
A: I just said I keep track of a lot of things.

Q: Do you know where you're going to be living in six weeks?
A: No. Aside from a general "northern Virginia" type of answer.

Q: Do you know how you're going to earn money for your family in six weeks?
A: Did my father-in-law put you up to this line of questioning?

Q: What do you do to pass the time at work?
A: That's a great question. I like to watch "Primetime in No Time" and it's scrappy cousin "Daytime in No Time" on Yahoo! [their exclamation point, not mine].

Q: How do you get to these shows?
A: You go to http://www.yahoo.com/. Click on the "entertainment" tab. Then click on "more entertainment." Then click on the "TV" tab. Then scroll all the way to the bottom of the page.

Q: Are you serious?
A: I don't think they want anyone to know they're there. But I'll take all the hard work out of it for you: PiNT and DiNT.

Q: Who's your favorite celebrity right now?
A: I'd say Jenny Sanford. Between the belittling position of accepting your spouse's infidelity and the haughty position of a "zero strikes and your out" mentality is the level-headed, self-respecting yet forgiving statement of Jenny Sanford. I've written before about the annoyingly self-righteous attitude of the modern woman, and I dislike anyone who deals in ultimatums, especially before the fact.

Q: Wow, what a way to end on a downer.
A: Tell me about it. And it'll be two weeks before I post anything more upbeat.

Kid Dance Party

Jerome Jerome the Metronome is sneaking up on one-and-a-half, getting ready to scare the bejesus out of it with one of his 120-dB screams. This week we discovered that he has a favorite song: “Human,” by The Killers. He can recognize the beginning of the song and, when in his car seat, starts kicking his legs around to dance. When Articulate Joe was his age, he would do the same thing for “Tell Her Tonight” by Franz Ferdinand, and for Crazy Jane it was “Just a Gigolo” by Louis Prima. I don’t know what music I liked when I was 18 months old, but I know it wasn’t anywhere near this cool. Our kids don’t appreciate how much work we put in to keeping them from being nerds. (We have to work extra hard to counteract the homeschooling.)

All Kinds of Crap

Firstly, I’m yet to mention in this space that my Pittsburgh Penguins beat the Detroit Flyer Tires for the Stanley Cup. Since we don’t have cable, I’d listened to all the playoff games on the radio from nhl.com. (Major League Baseball, take a lesson: making your fans jump through hoops to access your product just makes them former fans.) However, for the final game we were at my parents’ house in Saint Louis, so I got to watch the game with my mother and brother, who are also Penguins fans, and my father, who says he’s a Penguins fan, but who actually just spent the entire third period saying, “Why won’t these guys play any offense?” So congratulations to the Penguins. If the Pirates could just finish the year at 81-81, it would be the perfect year of sports for Pittsburgh.

Secondly, my parents aren’t going to live in Saint Louis anymore. They are moving to western Ohio in the next few months. My brother and his wife, however, will stay behind, at least for now. He insists he wants to move back to California eventually, but I think as soon as he realizes that California is for crap, he’ll change his mind.

Thirdly, Baby X passed his heart checkup and consequently is now graduated to a new blog nickname: Jerome Jerome the Metronome (which is something entirely different from Jerome K. Jerome).

Fourthly, our car’s air conditioning, which has been broken for two weeks, is now fixed, and for only $147.

Fifthly, at the end of this week we head out for Utah on a trip that will get me 29 new counties, three new national parks, a new baseball stadium and baseball team seen, and (I hope) thousands of pages read.

Sixthly, Persephone and I are in the early stages of creating an awesome present/joke for a friend. It should turn out AWESOME.

What I Like About My Wife's Friend

I don’t agree with Angela’s hatred of Julia Stiles, but I like that Angela is a consistent Julia Stiles hater. And when my wife wrote a long blog post that barely mentioned cake, Angela (who loves cake, according to her blog), made note of the passing mention.

(I tried to find a picture of either Julia Stiles eating cake, or a Julia Stiles cake, but Google wasn’t up to the task. However, the first page up for a search of “Julia Stiles cake” is Angela’s blog.)

The Hate Train's A-Comin'

So it seems these days I get most of my will to live from my intense hatred of various things and people. And as hard as this may be to believe, I’ve found something I hate even more than old people: Lady Gaga.

Old people have at least SOME redeeming qualities: they often die with piles of cash to distribute, and they are hilarious when they are in movies to say age-inappropriate things, like, “If peeing your pants is cool, consider me Miles Davis.” Lady Gaga, however, has no redeeming qualities at all. She can’t sing, she can’t dance, she can’t wear pants, she can’t name herself, she can’t display her natural hair, and she can’t do her makeup. (I’d include a picture of her here, but celebrity photo copyrights seem more binding than stock photo copyrights, which I violate all the time.) Whenever I see a picture of her she looks more ridiculous than ever before. Her celebrity reminds me to repent because the Apocalypse must be just weeks away. A careful reading of Revelation yields this: “Beware the coming of the talentless Italian fake bisexual, for then ye shall know that the end is near, yea, it is even upon you as pantlessness is upon her. Amen.” I guess Lady Gaga DOES have at least one redeeming quality: she reminds us, “Jesus is coming; look busy!”

My Hatred of Old People

You want to know why Newsweek sucks? Because they ask needless questions, such as “Are Baby Boomers responsible for the economic downturn?” Newsweek, you could have just stopped after four words. Of COURSE Baby Boomers are responsible. They are responsible for everything that’s gone wrong in America for the past 40 years. There are several different viable ways of running a country, but filling it with a generation of narcissists isn’t one of them. People complain “today’s kids don’t know how to work, they just want everything.” Well, who raised them that way? Childhood is by definition egocentric; growing up is supposed to be a process of learning to move beyond that. However, just about every under-30 in the country was raised to believe the sun does indeed shine out his ass. Baby Boomers were incapable of teaching anyone how to get over himself because they never thought it was worth learning how to do. Now they have no shame complaining about having to own a smaller house or fewer than 1.2 cars per licensed driver. This is the generation that brought you the idea that not shopping at Whole Foods is somehow jeopardizing your family’s health.

Note to old people: retiring is what you do when you can’t work anymore. It’s not what you do when you no longer enjoy work. The name for that is “being an adult.” Perhaps you should learn about it, before you finish bankrupting the country.