Playtime

Starting today, and for the rest of the week, I’m on vacation. Of course the best part of being on vacation is not being at work, but knowing that I’ll still get paid for the days I’m off. Taking into account that the CEO of my company was paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $13 million dollars for last year, my measly four weeks of vacation is small consolation. But that’s a topic for a different rant.

When I was growing up, my family didn’t take vacations. It was due to financial restrictions as much as anything. One of the few trips I can remember taking was a Christmas trip to Denver to my maternal grandparents. I was a junior in high school and a cross-country trip with my parents was the last place I wanted to be. I had a girlfriend for the first time and that four or five days seemed like an eternity. This was also during a time when my father and I seemed to argue about everything under the sun, including whether or not the sun was shining. Merry Christmas indeed.

Things were only slightly better when my own kids were growing up. But we did take a few trips together. There were a couple of camping trips that were very memorable. One of them was to Door County, Wisconsin, and we stayed in a very nice campground. The only drawback was they put us in a space normally used to  campers and the whole area was covered in gravel. That would have been fine if we had been in a camper, but we had a tent.

That camping trip was punctuated by a horrendous thunder storm on our next to last night there. The wind was whipping the trees around us, rain was pouring down in sheets, and lightning was striking very close to us ever four or five seconds. On top of that, the kids discovered why you never touch a canvas tent in a rain storm. Doing so starts a steady flow of water into the tent, which is just what you don’t want.

We made it through the night, having spent about 90 minutes sitting in the car at the height of the storm. We all were soaked to the skin during the move to the car, but the lightning crashing around us made that seem to be the more prudent course of action. We found out later that day that there were several tornadoes spotted within a few miles of our location. I can’t say from first-hand experience, but I’m pretty sure a tent is not a good place to be in a tornado.

One of the most anticipated vacations we planned as a family was a trip to Washington, D.C. that we took in the early 1990s. My oldest son was 16 years old, so the baby was around two years old. One of my co-workers loaned us a pop-up camper that was plenty big enough for our family of seven.

On the way, we stopped in Pennsylvania, as planned, at a campsite that was somewhere in the mountains of the state along the turnpike. I don’t remember the name of the town, but it should have been burned into my memory for ever.

As my son, Chris and I were setting up the camper, my then-wife took the baby and walked up an embankment to a small pond so that he could watch some geese. There had been a rain shower that afternoon and the grass was wet. As the walked back down the bank, my ex-wife felt herself slip and fearing injury to Aaron, the baby, she twisted herself to try not to land on him. I heard the “SNAP” as her ankle caught and broke. When I ran up to her, one look at the peculiar way her foot was pointing told me that vacation was over before it had really begun.

Needless to say, that vacation is quite memorable, but for all the wrong reasons. After surgery to repair the ankle, and a day to recover somewhat from the ordeal, we loaded my ex-wife into the back seat of our Ford Aerostar, hooked up the camper, and headed back to Illinois. They couldn’t put her leg in a cast because of swelling, so it was not a comfortable ride for her. Compounding the misery, the camper decided that both tires were way too old, and they both blew out. One when we were about six blocks from home. I just drug it home on the rim and paid for the damage.

For this little vacation, my wife and I are driving to Mooresville, NC (Race City U.S.A.) tomorrow, which is close to Charlotte and a two and a half hour trip. I am going to keep a sharp eye out for any hazards, so I don’t anticipate any repeats of past disasters. We are both NASCAR fans, so we’re going to visit the shops of some of our favorite drivers. There are also a couple of museums related to the NASCAR world that we plan on visiting. Mostly, we are going to enjoy each other’s company. After all, isn’t that what vacations are for?