Category Archives: Travel Tribulations

KILLERS DON’T WEAR FLIP FLOPS

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Tuesday, my mid-life crisis reached Code Blue status as I boarded a plane for Denver to check out a vintage camper I’d seen on-line.  Yes, you heard me right. A vintage camper.

Who am I you ask?  I can’t honestly answer that anymore.  For example, it wasn’t until I was all the way through airport security before I realized I’d walked on the floor with bare feet.  Can you imagine?  BARE FEET!

This mid-life crisis is pulling me forward, out of my rut, faster than I can think, because here I was with $5,000 cash in my purse ready to drive up to a remote cabin to meet a strange man to buy a 1955 Aljoa camper.  Sounds like the beginning of a bad slasher movie doesn’t it?

Reason returned to me before I boarded the plane and I made arrangement to meet him at a storage facility on edge of town. Except then I realized he could kill me, stuff me in the camper and store me away for eternity.

I walked down the aisle of the plane in a stupor, wondering again who I was and what I was doing. I came across an entire row of empty seats and climbed over to the window.  A little towheaded face popped up from the seat in front of me.

“Peek-A-Boo,” she shouted before disappearing.

I was pretty sure I’d figured out why this row was empty.  The piercing scream that made my ear drums vibrate in pain, confirmed my conclusion.

The little girl emerged again. I grinned and waved at her.  Most people are turned away by a screaming child, but not me.  In complete contradiction to my OCD ways,  I gravitate toward them like a fly to honey.  I love kids and everything about them.  From their chubby toes to their drooling mouths. I mean, who wouldn’t smile when a two-year-old looks you in the eye and asks with the seriousness of a nuclear scientist, “Do you have a penis or a vagina?”

But I digress.

Part-time Murderer

We landed in Denver.  I got off the plane, rented my car and headed out to meet up with Ed, the part-time vintage camper renovator/part-time murderer.   I drove straight to the storage facility (also, as it turns out, not a very good place to be carrying $5,000 in cash.)

I huddled in the corner of the office wondering which way I was going to die when the camper came into view.  As Ed emerged from his tinted windowed black pick up truck I noticed he was wearing flip-flops.  I sighed with relief.  Everyone knows killers don’t wear flip-flops.

He gave me a quick tour of my new camper.  I said it was deal and rushed him through the paperwork.

“What’s the big hurry?” he asked.

“I have a flight back to Kansas City in a couple of hours.”

“Wow.” He looked at me with admiration.  “You’re an adventurer.”

I grinned and stood up a little straighter and said “Yes.  That’s exactly who I am now.  I’m an Adventurer.”

Me and Ed-Not-A-Part-Time-Murderer

This Game Called Spoons

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I survived the family vacation, but I’m not sure I can say the same for my nephew’s kids.

When he and his wife arrived with their four, very well behaved, little girls they looked something like this.

Good Girls

They sat quietly, shared their toys without complaint and volunteered to clean up.

However, after the residents of Crazie Town taught them how to have pillow fights, how to rip the winning Slap Jack card from their little sister’s hand and how to shout taunts of “DRAW BABY, DRAW” while playing vicious games of Uno, they looked like this.

Bad Girls

As I was apologizing to my nephew for his daughters latest Slap Jack fight, he said it reminded him of the time he came to visit Crazie Town as a kid and we played some evil game called Spoons.

“Spoons?” his eldest daughter asked.  “What’s Spoons?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said.  “It’s kind of like musical chairs only with cards and spoons.  You probably wouldn’t like it any way.”

Five minutes later she quietly sidled up beside me and laid a stack of spoons on the table.  “Teach me this game…” her eyes searched mine, hungry for knowledge…”this game called Spoons.”

I hesitated, not sure if she was ready for such an evil activity because here are the “rules” as they are known in Crazie Town.

1.  Remove all chairs and pull dining room table into the center of the room.

2.  Place spoons (one less than number of players) in center of table.

3. Players stand around the edge of the table.  Note:  Taller or gullible people are to be assigned the corners.

4.  Shuffle several decks of cards together and deal four to each player.

5.  Dealer draws one card from the deck.  He/She keeps it toward their match or passes it face down to the next person who picks it up and does the same.

6.  When a player manages to get three of a kind they calmly reach for a spoon, as does everyone else.

7.  The spoon-less person earns a letter toward the spelling of the word S-P-O-O-N.  (Or the spelling of LOSER, IDIOT, etc.)

In Crazie Town, rule number six is…shall we say…negotiable.

I remember a game where my older brother chased me through the dining room and kitchen, up the stairs and into the attic where he wrenched the winning spoon from my hand.  For some unknown reason, this was ruled “Fair Play” and thus, the game of Full Contact Spoons was born.

My first Thanksgiving dinner with my husband’s family almost ended in a trip to the emergency room when he thought it would be funny to sweep all the spoons onto the floor.  Husband and his daughter chased a spoon across the living room, bumping into a large bookcase that would have crushed them had someone not grabbed it at the last minute.  (Said person never releasing control of their precious spoon, of course.)

I once taught the game to a dozen, quite civilized, British people who, within ten minutes were standing atop a fifteen foot long antique harvest table wrestling and screaming for spoons.  The tournament came down to two men, my husband being one of them. The other being a proud gay man.  (As an aside…this proud gay man loved to sunbathe nude.  The first day of our trip, he came strolling out of the house naked and plopped himself down next to my husband whose only reaction was to ask “could you point that thing the other direction?)   But I digress.  On this particular evening of the Spoons game that came down to two men, we quickly chose sides and stood behind our Olympians shouting our support.  Year’s later, the results are still disputed and arguments deteriorate into who saved whom in what war.

Is that the kind of activity in which a little seven year old girl should be participating?

My better judgement did prevail and my niece left the family vacation for home without the knowledge of This Game Called Spoons.

At least until next year.