Day One--Beat It

Jimmy is reading over my shoulder and will probably be making a lot of snide comments, so please excuse if this entry is weird.

We started out at the crack of nine o'clock, after everybody had hung around our house and waited for half an hour. Oddly, the trip got off without a hitch. We didn't hit any dogs or anything. After an hour or two on the road, Emily got out her laptop so I could get some work done on my new story. Unfortunately, she then felt that she was entitled to look over my shoulder and make fun of my characters. My ego irreplaceably damaged, I choked back tears, put the laptop away, and took up Jimmy on his suggestion to teach us how to play five-card draw.

Five-card draw took a good two and a half hours of our day, especially because Emily kept looking at my cards, but the whole game changed when we started betting. Of course, we weren't betting anything--we were using BananaGrams as chips, consonant worth five, vowels worth ten--but even betting BananaGrams brought out a whole new aspect of the game. It was fun... but I definitely can see how people get addicted to gambling. I think you'll never have a problem if you never bet anything more valuable than vowels and consonants, though, never fear.

We stopped and ate lunch, which was even less interesting than it sounds. It was, however, delicious.

Dad broke out the guitars and we spent another good bit of time playing guitar. Jimmy taught me how to play the intro to "Dueling Banjos." If you ask me, that is worth the price of admission right there.

I read a little and crocheted a little. It's funny how when you're traveling, the minutes drag but the hours fly. Before I knew it, we were in Tennesee and had been on the road for a good eight hours.

I complained about being bored, so Dad suggested we tell a round-robin story. It started off with a fictional Jimmy and his friends creating gold by burning old furniture and ended with the ghost of Michael Jackson facing off with *NSYNC. You want to know the worst part? It was still boring.

We four kids played a game called Blokus, which is like Tetris, only with four people and in reverse. Justin compared the relative merits of each of the five Resident Evil games and the weapons therein for the better part of the late afternoon.

Just when we were starting to get restless, we made it into the campsite. However, the fun didn't stop there. Our Subaru Forester got a dead battery and required pushing from the entrance to the campsite. (However, as Jimmy remarked, everybody secretly wants to push a car at some point in their lifetime, and we all jumped at the chance.) After that fiasco was taken care of, Justin and I scouted out the camping grounds. I was looking for some rocks big enough to climb and lamenting that I'd left my climbing shoes at home, and Justin was search for a game hall. A video game hall, to be precise. He seemed to be operating under the not-quite-correct assumption that the rural campsites of the American Heartland are teeming with video game halls. I thought it kinder not to correct him. Even if you never find the Holy Grail, isn't it the journey that counts?

Emily wasn't feeling well and Dad and I made a Tylenol run. We followed the TomTom past two different mini-mart gas stations that were built about thirty feet away from each other. I never understand when I see two gas stations side-by-side. That's like building a Target at the same mall as a K-Mart, it just doesn't make sense. The two gas stations were on opposite sides of the spectrum of the gas-station-niceness-scale, however: one was shiny, clean Mega-Star, the other looked like the kind of place where you could go in the back and buy crystal meth. It was a charming little dichotomy. I wondered if there was a rivalry between the two stores or if the coexisted peacefully.

We followed the TomTom, which led us down a dark alley of abandoned warehouses, restaurant-supply stores, and self-storage centers. I fully expected to drive straight into a Steven King novel, it was that kind of place--nothing in-your-face creepy about it, but a little off all the same. We got to the store in question and found it closed, so our only option was to go back to the convince stores.

"Which do you want to go to, the Mega-Star or the other one?" my dad asked.
"The other one," I answered immediately. "It looks more interesting."
"It looks a little seedy to me," he said, as he turned in and the entire wall devoted to alcoholic beverages came into view.
"That's what makes it interesting," I said.

I had to wait in the car while the engine was running because we had run into so much trouble jumping the battery once we pushed the car to the campsite, but I wished I had the chance to go in. I saw from the window something advertised as the "Walk-In Beer Cave." I think I'd really like to see some of the people who frequent a store with a Walk-In Beer Cave. I think it would have been quite the experience.

We got the Tylenol and went back to our campsite, and that's when we ran into trouble. We were in the middle of dinner when an RV drove up and a guy got out of it and told us we were in his campsite. The campsite we booked was two spots down. He asked us to move, which seems like a reasonable request on the surface, until you consider the facts. All he had at the campsite in question were three candles on the picnic table and two pieces of wood in the camp ring. My family, on the other hand, had to bring all our dinner dishes inside in a hurry, move Jimmy and Justin's tent, move our car, and disconnect all the wires to and from the RV, then reconnect them at the other campsite. Which we did.

Well. Um, I guess I should give the guy the benefit of the doubt. But when I meet a person who thinks it makes sense to make a family move their tent, car, and RV from Campsite 1 to Campsite 2 when all they would have to do to take Campsite 2 is move three small candles off the picnic table, well, I start to doubt the wisdom of holding popular elections.