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Sometimes, when something just doesn’t seem to go your way, your first thought usually isn’t "This will make a funny story someday.” (Although maybe if it was, we might have better coping skills. Right?)
Anyway, one of my goals has been to take a trip with each one of my children separately. That way, when I’m old and feeble, they’ll have those pleasant memories of "that time mom and I went on vacation”.
This year it was my 15 year old’s turn.
First of all, let me say that I’m not quite prepared for him to be 15. I’m not sure what happened, but I’m pretty sure I blinked and he went from 5 to 15. Secretly, I think he’s been cheating at this whole “growing up” thing and has been sneaking in extra years at bedtime. That is just the only logical explanation that I can come up with for why he’s a giant man child now with a fuzzy caterpillar above his lip.
But I digress.
The trip started off with not one, but TWO delayed flights. I tried not to think that it might be an indicator of how the rest of the trip was going to go, but to be honest, it wasn’t off to a great start. The flight was already kind of a crap show because it was overshooting our actual destination, then making us wait around an airport for 3 hours before backtracking to our final stopping point. Then we tacked on a delay out of both airports and it turned out that we didn’t get to our B’n’B until 11 pm. Do you know how exhausting hanging around an airport and sitting on an airplane can be? Who would have thought that a whole day of doing nothing could be so draining. You might as well have stuck a fork in us because we were done.
We retrieve the rental car and that was a pretty cool process because they literally turned us loose in this giant parking garage and said, “Choose any from row 3.” I then found out that I choose rental cars like I choose my scratch off lottery tickets: not well and with bad luck. If you’re wondering how that can even happen, let me start off by saying that the mileage was in kilometers. KILOMETERS. My son is performing conversions on his phone for me while I’m trying to keep up with the insane psychopaths intent on mowing us down with their vehicles. At the end of the trip he says, “It’s not that hard you just have to count x miles for every x kilometers.” Uh, no, sorry. I can’t math AND drive at the same time. It’s literally why they gave me that handy little gauge that says mph. Talk about distracted driving. “Here, solve for x while driving 55 mph with 3 lanes of cars all pissed off that you’re not driving at breakneck speed like they want you to.” Uh, no thanks, I’ll pass.
On top of not making it to our rental place until that late, but we weren’t able to get to Walmart to grab staples like coffee, food, coffee, water, did I mention COFFEE?!?!?!? Walmart closed at 11. We were there at 10:51. They lied.
My husband was extremely thankful to be multiple states away from me the next morning, I’m sure.
We make a trek first thing to get that life giving magic bean juice for mama and were immediately accosted by a homeless woman asking for pennies. So that she could stop sleeping at the bus stop. Now, while I sympathize with her plight, it’s early o’clock and I have zero caffeine in me. I’m impressed that I have functioning brain cells. I can’t handle this kind of ambush at this hour. Sadly, I informed her that I didn’t carry cash, which is a completely true story that you can validate with my husband. (Although if you DO confirm it, you’ll probably have to hear about how it’s a conspiracy that I don’t carry cash and that he does. Don’t listen to it. Lies. All of it.)
Luckily, the fuqery seemed to have calmed down after that. Other than the insane psychopaths trying to mow us down every time we traveled on the highways. Fortunately, Siri has a handy little “avoid highways” option that we utilized so that we could travel at a much more sedate, lower blood pressure pace. The flight Gods smiled down on us for our return flight…if you don’t count that the airline switched us from 9am to 7am. This meant that I had to be awake at NOPE o’clock and peel my eyeballs open long enough to shove contacts in while hooking up that IV of coffee directly to my vein. If you ever have the opportunity to get up at 4:00 in the morning, I highly DO NOT suggest it. 10 out of 10 would not recommend.
At the end of the day though, we had a lovely time. We visited some fun places and got to spend some quality time together. Plus now, we get to have that great story.
"Hey, remember the time our rental car was in kilometers?” (And we’ll laugh and laugh and laugh.)
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