Thinking The Lions: Vacation All I Ever Wanted.

Monday, June 30, 2008

Vacation All I Ever Wanted.

Here is some interesting math for you: My ratio of hours of sleep to alligators in the past 5 days is about 25-1 -- which is to say, I slept 1 hour for every 25 alligators I saw on vacation.

I like those numbers.

We took 80% of our kids on vacation over the last week. Oldest is 21 now and has important things to do like see her new boyfriend and wait for her tax rebate check, so she opted not to go. She did call us several times to complain that her tax rebate had not arrived and to complain that she wished she'd come, so it was a lot like having her on vacation anyway; complaining is how Oldest blows off steam.

I blow off steam by taking two teenagers, two toddlers, and Sweetie on a cross-country trip to Orlando and Tampa, but by "Orlando" I actually mean "Kissimmee," which I pronounce "kiss-im-me" but which The Boy and Middle tell me (repeatedly) is pronounced "kiss-sim-mee." I meant to take us to Orlando, and we actually did go to Orlando -- we just did not stay in Orlando, because I never stay where I think I'm going to stay. When we went to California, I thought we were going to stay in Redondo Beach, which I picked for our vacation because it was mentioned in a Beach Boys song. But we stayed in Hermosa Beach, which is not mentioned in any songs, so far as I can tell. Before that, when Sweetie and I went to New York, I booked all our nights into hotels in advance, only to find out later that the hotel I'd booked us into in New York was actually in New Jersey, and in a bad part of New Jersey, at that.

It was a bad part of New Jersey because first, while it was, as advertised, only a mile or two from Manhattan, that "mile or two" was the Hudson River or the East River or some river, or maybe a bay; I'm not very strong on geography because I spent all my time in school studying the Gilded Age and pretending to read the books I was assigned, books like Slaughterhouse-5, which I eventually did read and which allowed me to make a connection, on this vacation, with Billy Pilgrim in a burger-ish sort of way. (And that, readers, is called foreshadowing, a literary technique in which a writer [me] lets the reader [you] know that eventually he's going to tell you a story about eating a burger and try to make it seem significant somehow.)

It was a bad part of New Jersey, second, because, as the new hotel booking agent I talked to on the phone told me: "If you're taking your wife there on your honeymoon, you'll also want to take an Uzi." She may have been just downing the competition, but I believed her. I was talking to her, at that point, on the first night of our honeymoon, when we had checked into the first hotel I'd picked out, and were horrified because it was in a terrible neighborhood and was dirty and appeared to have cameras installed in the walls. I should have, then, been tipped off not just by the fact that our hotel was the only building for miles that didn't look like a crackhouse, but also by the fact that the check-in desk was protected by bulletproof glass. I didn't sleep at all that night, because I was worried that we'd be mugged or perhaps just poisoned by whatever was on the bedspread; instead, I spent the night rebooking our hotels, which is how I came to talk to that particular lady who explained to me all the problems with the hotel I had selected on my own.

That's part of how we ended up in Kissimmee instead of Orlando; the other part is that we were staying in Sweetie's parent's time-share. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We left for vacation on Wednesday morning, but it would be equally correct to say that we left on Tuesday night, because our flight was scheduled to depart at 6 a.m., which meant we needed to be at the airport by 4 a.m. -- not because of security, but because the logistics involved with getting the teenagers and Babies! and enough electronics to build a new space shuttle through security. One whole carry-on was devoted exclusively to electronics: two cameras, two iPods, a laptop, a portable DVD player a "Playstation Portable," and approximately 1000 miles of adapter cords, all of which were entangled into a Gordian knot the precise moment that I put them in the suitcase.

In packing that carry-on, I took a safety precaution that the experienced travelers among you will recognize: I stuffed (clean) disposable diapers above, below, and all around the electronics so that when The Boy, whose job it was to transport the electronics carry-on, dropped it (as he did roughly every 3.5 seconds), the electronics would not be broken.

The clever use of diapers also meant that we were even more completely unprepared to go through security than I had thought, because it meant that The Boy had to unpack all the diapers to get to the laptop to start it up to prove to them that we were not going to blow up the plane. In this case, though, I think it would be reasonable to assume we were maniacs,because who else besides suicidal maniacs is carrying two toddlers through an airport at 4 a.m.?

We were packed and ready to go Tuesday night, because I had it all carefully worked out to minimize problems and maximize relaxation. I had sorted the carry-ons into three categories: electronics, food, and "miscellaneous." "Miscellaneous" included more diapers, the DVDs to watch on the player, the book "So Big," starring Elmo, some random toys that I'd grabbed, and the book I hoped to read on the plane. We had the suitcases ready to go, the documents in a special folder, and I'd laid out my clothes, which included one of the t-shirts I'd made (cross country advertising!), cargo shorts, and, as a last-minute switch, sneakers instead of "Mocks."

The "Mocks" I was going to wear are fake "Crocs," those awesome shoes that everybody hates. I got my pair from the Babies! for Father's Day and was planning on wearing them on the plane, but at the last minute packed them and wore my Starbury running shoes instead, because there might be some sort of traveling emergency that would require me to have reasonably-priced footwear on.

Then, we went to bed with the alarms set for 3 a.m. We were on a tight schedule: Up at 3; shower, get ready, load the car, have the older kids get in, and then at the last second, we would go up, wake the Babies!, dress them, and get them in the car before they knew what happened.

I have to say, it worked perfectly, except that by "perfectly" I mean "not at all." First, we couldn't pack all the suitcases right away because Sweetie and Middle are girls, which means that they had to use each of their 140 different skin-care products first thing in the morning, and then pack them in the suitcase, because skin-care products cannot be taken onto a plane nowadays unless the total amount of product is less than 3 ounces and is in a clear plastic bag and was not made in China and you can answer three security questions including "What's the president of Nigeria's middle name?" (Answer: If you know it, you are a terrorist.)

We learned about that regulation and others the day before while trying to decide what we could put in the carry-ons. Our plan with the Babies! to get them to behave on the flight was to drug them into submission and then ply them with bottles and cookies everytime they woke up (we had the same plan with The Boy and Middle, only with "electronics" and "gummi worms" substituted at the appropriate place.) Only we didn't know what drugs and bottles and cookies might be allowed on the plane: Could we take formula? Were cookies okay? What if they were not the take-apart Oreo-kind of cookies, making them less of a security risk because you can't hide something in a Chips Ahoy!, while you might be able to hide something in one of those double-stuff Oreos 'cause they have a lot of frosting?

Those were not the only questions we had about the trip, either. We also wondered whether our ATM cards would be any good in Florida. We wondered that because everyone knows that you can't carry cash on a vacation; in fact, based on years of seeing Karl Malden on TV, everyone knows that if you are more than 0.7 miles from your home, and you have more than $1 cash on you, you're a sucker who's marked for death. Here' s a universal truth about the United States: Everyone who lives anywhere else but your home is a thief and possibly a murderer. So to avoid trouble, when you go on vacation to troubled areas like Orlando, you have to secure your cash. I already carry my wallet in my front pocket all the time because my upbringing taught me that everyone I see, including my boss and probably the Babies!, is a pickpocket, so I had a head start on the plethora of con-men and castoffs from Danny Ocean's crew that were waiting to beset us in Orlando.

We learned that our ATM cards would, in fact, work just fine in Florida, a state which, as it turns out, is part of our banking system and everything. Actually, we learned that the random guy who answered the phone at our bank thought that our ATM cards would work just fine, probably, in Florida. Thus almost reassured, we decided to risk it. What's the worst that could happen?

By the way, I learned never to ask that question around Sweetie, who gets nervous about traveling (and why not, with all the terrorists and thieves and lack of access to face creams while in flight?) I learned not to ask that when she was nervous about the flight and asked if I thought it was likely that we would crash, and I said I thought a crash was extremely unlikely. I then added, to reassure her: "Don't worry, though. If the plane crashes, you'll never even know it because we'll be dead." That did not reassure her, for some reason.

Once we got the suitcases packed and the suitcases loaded and the older kids loaded, it was time to stow the Babies! And we were only 10 minutes behind schedule at that point, too. We went up to their room and turned on their light and tried to act happy and cheerful, as though it was not only normal to wake them in the middle of the night, but a fun, partyish kind of thing, too.

They were not fooled and began crying immediately. Moving as quickly as we could, we threw on their traveling clothes and started to head down. That's when Mr Bunches decided that he wanted Sweetie, and Sweetie only, to carry him, which would have been fine except that Sweetie had already handed him to me so that I had both twins and she could throw away their diapers and lock up the house. So I tried to just hustle him down to the car, but he began screaming more and more and that upset Mr F, who started crying, but I soldiered on and we got them to the car, where Sweetie began strapping them into their seats while I went to turn the lights off in the car that The Boy had pulled into the garage; we'd had him park the car in the garage, and he'd thoughtfully left the interior lights on and locked the door.

These are kids that don't lock our house door. But put a car into a locked garage, and they seal it up hermetically.

So I had to go get the car keys to unlock it to turn off the light, and left Sweetie to supervise the remainder of babyloading. She was trying to settle down Mr Bunches, who is no pushover. Having failed with just crying, he upped the ante: While I went to get the keys, Mr Bunches decided to barf.

I came out with the keys and had to go back in and get a change of clothes, and we changed Mr Bunches in the car in the driveway, his howls and Mr F's cries waking up the neighborhood.

With that finished, we started our vacation... only 40 minutes behind schedule.

Tomorrow: From the airport to our first day in Orlando!