VACATION INTENSITY

Webster’s College Dictionary defines “vacation” as, “A period of suspension of regular work, study, or other activity, usually used for rest, recreation, or travel.”  My interpretation is a little different, “Overindulge and cram an immense amount of activities, food, and fun into the little free time earned from working your posterior off all year!”  So, in my world, if you want to rest and relax, do it after work or on a weekend, ‘cause vacation is a get up, go, and experience life to the maximum.  There is no time to sit idle, watch TV, listen to the news, chart your failing stocks, worry about your bills…it’s play time, fun time, experience something new, different, and exciting time.  Some people feel travel should be carefree and spontaneous…not me, I planned almost every minute of my family’s vacation to Los Angeles.  And that is why my family came home totally and completely exhausted, yet I’m sure at the same time insanely thrilled and happy they got to participate and enjoy the experience.  Can you believe it, Disneyland, Catalina Island, Paramount Studios, Universal Studios, over 30 hours of driving, constantly moving, filled with excitement and loads of fun, all in just six days…now that to me is a successful, perfect vacation!  We drove all night to get back home the day before we had to go to work, so it was somewhere around noon the next day that we all finally got up.  It wasn’t more than a couple seconds after I had dragged myself out of bed and sat at the kitchen table that I perceived something was amiss.  My wife, exhaustedly dragging her slippers, hair all a-strew, thumps a cup of hot tea down in front of me, and very pointedly exclaims, “I’m planning next year’s vacation, not you!  Capisce?”

      --- Dee Flatedtires

SECOND LOOKS

We visited Italy a few years ago with our teenage daughters.  My husband and I got one of the biggest kicks out of just walking down non-touristy streets.  As there were five of us, it became difficult for all of us to walk together side by side, and not to forget the fact that the adolescent girls didn’t want to walk with their parents anyway.  So they took it upon themselves the challenge to navigate threw the maze of small foreign city streets.  This arrangement of a middle-aged couple walking ten feet behind these three young ladies repeated itself in every city we visited.  The unique thing about Italy is that Italians tend to outwardly express and verbalize their emotions.  That fact is what inflated our parental ego’s and kept us smiling the entire time there.  As our girls walked ahead of us down the street, we could see them nudge, elbow, or nod to each other as they smiled and passed by any grouping of handsome young men walking the opposite direction.  We then watched the young men smile and take a second or third head-turning look back at the girls and wave a hand in the air and comment to each other, “Ahhh, si, molto bello!”(Ahh, yes, very beautiful!)

        ---Proud Parents

CAMP SMELLY

Tent camping is the opportunity to get back in touch with nature and enjoy its raw beauty.  However, one of our tent camping trips was abound by nature and not necessarily a pleasant one.  We set up camp, enjoyed the evening, and stowed everything away like good campers.  Regardless, in the middle of the night the combination of shuffling around outside tour tents and the unpleasant smell spelled skunk.  Peeking out of the tent, the full moon light allowed us to see not one skunk but eight smelly snoops going through everything in the campsite.  After about a half hour of strong nasal discomfort, they moved on to the next campsite.  By the next afternoon, everything was aired-out enough for us to pack up and find a sweeter smelling campground.

        --- Happy Campers

RV Sledding

We were married a little over a year and my bride and I successfully convinced my parents that we were responsible married adults to borrow their pride and joy 24-foot motor home to do some RV camping in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park for a short four-day weekend.  Anticipating a nice weekend, we packed light and mapped out our route.  We left my parents sunny Southern California beach city and realized we were making pretty good time and thought we’d be able to take in both parks.  We quickly adjusted our planned route to the southern most entrance and re-routed ourselves to follow a smaller two lane road along the Park’s edge that would allow us to enter the parks from the northern entrance, travel through both parks and exit from the southern entrance.  We drove an hour without seeing another vehicle. 

This change of plans was not the wisest decision considering we had not bothered to check the weather before we left and ended up driving into a snowstorm.  Without a turnout or adjacent road to turn around on the narrow road, we quickly studied our map and figured we were within a couple miles of the intersection onto the main road.  The snow kept falling and getting deeper and deeper as we slowly progressed up the road.  

Suddenly we started loosing traction and I knew we had to quickly find a spot to pull over and figure out which cabinet the chains were stored in.  Then things went from bad to worse when on the next slightly banked turn going only ten miles per- hour the dual rear tires started to fish-tail.  I quickly stopped and we both screamed profanities in panic as the entire multi-ton motor home began sliding sideways with no forward motion.  It came to a stop less than six inches from the three-foot deep ditch on the side of the road.  Luckily the banked turn was away from the fifty-foot drop on the other side of the road without a guardrail road. 

Not being prepared for a sudden winter storm, I had to go out in the snow with shorts and a T-shirt wrapped in the largest towel we could find, and with socks on my hands I proceeded to find the chains stowed in one of the RV’s outside storage lockers.  After finding the chains and scraping the snow away from the tires with a small camping shovel, I laid the chains out and prayed I’d be able to roll backward over them.  Surprisingly we rolled backward a foot or so to allow the chains to be pulled over the tires.  Having never put chains on a car before, let alone dual truck tires, I hoped I was installing them correctly.  After barely getting them latched on and fighting frostbitten fingers after an hour in the cold, we decided to just get moving as the snow was still falling and getting deeper by the minute. 

I must have not put the chains on incorrectly because by the time we got to the main road where it wasn’t snowing much, the chains had eaten two huge holes in the wheel wells of the motor home.  A mile more heading down the hill on the main road away from the park, all the while listening to the chunk, chunk, chunk of more motor home being eaten by the chains, I was able to take the chains off.  We decided the weekend was a loss and headed directly home to face the consequence and wrath of my parents.  To say the least, we were never allowed to use the motor home ever again!
         
        --- Ed Venture