Road Trip

Now that the structured summer activities are behind us - camp for AD, work/release program for the RM - I've been going a little bit stir crazy. I admittedly have it pretty easy, but there are only so many hours you can ignore your children at the pool before you start feeling a little guilty, and a lot restless. Since the RM is getting better about traveling I've been talking to JHP about doing a family trip somewhere, and I've also been realizing that my parents were either incredibly unsophisticated or else were trying to kill or disable Cslos and me growing up. Mom and Dad were great about taking us on family trips but the destinations and methodology were at times terribly suspect.

One vacation that was particularly memorable is our drive out west  in our 1970's child molester Econoline. The trip itself was fantastic overall - Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, all that - but we had a couple of unplanned detours that were Sketchy McSketcherson. Dad would stop for anything, ANYTHING, including one particularly awful homemade water slide right off the highway. This thing had been clumsily carved out of the side of a hill, coated with blacktop and powered by a garden hose running from the top of it. In what I'm assuming was commensurate with the demand, the water was off when we drove up so we had to wait a few minutes while the proprietor coated it enough to make it somewhat slideable. It was terrible; scoot yourself down a driveway after a light rain and you've got the idea. Multiple abrasions. Mom wouldn't even get out of the van; she just sat there, shaking her head and talking to herself. Part of me still isn't certain this wasn't part of a never-aired hidden camera show. I guess Dad didn't think that was upsetting enough because a few days later we stopped at what I can only describe, generously, as a Soviet amusement park. It was basically a parking lot with a Scrambler that was missing several cars, a miniature merry-go-round like the ones you see in front of grocery stores, a free-standing porch swing and three tricycles on an oval track. If there had been a concession stand it would have offered a single rotten turnip. Obviously the question is why wouldn't we stop here? There was all of one employee in the whole place, so if you wanted to ride anything you'd have to follow him over to a card table to buy tickets, then accompany him back to whatever had tickled your fancy. He had to actually operate the Scrambler and the carouselish thing, but we could handle the swing and the tricycles pretty well on our own, being that they were a swing and tricycles. I think the worst part about this place is that it was in the middle of nowhere, meaning Dad actually had made an effort to find it. Thanks to our horrid van with the blacked-out windows and the permanent "someone farted" look on Mom's face, it probably looked like Dad had kidnapped this poor woman and her daughters and just wanted to give them a bit of fun before gutting them like deer.

Another time Dad got a wild hair to head to Dogpatch, USA, a C-list theme park deep in the Ozarks dedicated to the characters of relentlessly unentertaining cartoonist Al Capp. Even more random, one of their chief attractions was grass skiing, an activity that consisted of strapping miniature tank treads to your feet and shooting down a mountain. Since even Dad saw the foolishness in that we mostly hung out with Li'l Abner Yokum and the Shmoo, or goofed off in the RV we'd borrowed from one of my dad's partners. My parents were quite comfortable with this particular vehicle, having used it - no shit - on several occasions to shuttle contraband cases of Coors beer to Memphis (a la Smokey and the Bandit) where it was banned due to its lack of pasteurization, so it was a familiar home away from home. It was also a fun ride for Cslos and me since they didn't make us use seatbelts at all; we were free to roam about as we pleased. This doesn't strike me as being quite as dangerous as when they drove to Nashville with us laying prone in the hatchback of Mom's two-seater Datsun 280Z, but still, Dr. Spock won't be giving them any awards.

 



 

Offering complimentary tours of our new meth labs

Obviously, I mostly blame Dad for all this though Mom isn't totally off the hook; while he came up with 90% of the content she sat back and let it happen. It's like that Martin Niemoller quote about when the Nazis came for the communists I remained silent, etc.; Mom's quiet acquiescence bought her a tour of the Corn Palace and a couple of nights at the Sioux City Best Western, among other indignities. I'm also a little concerned that I might have inherited a bit of this from Dad because just this week I felt it would be a good idea to take AD to White Water, a water park that, while not homemade, was briefly shut down a few years ago due to a scorching e coli outbreak. I'm almost certain I saw at least three people there who were in the process of peeing, and one of them wasn't even in the water at the time.

At least I didn't drive her there in the back of this thing. Good times.