Triple A Times Seven

I've been thinking about this one for a while, so it had better be a good one! I like it because it includes several travel stories of widely varying length and interest. More compelling than that, however, it delves into the always insane world I've inhabited for so many years, Show Business.

I started working for F/X Scenery And Display in January of 1996. There was a Project Manager there at the time that everyone on the crew hated to work with. That meant that, as the new guy, I was next to be awarded the honor of being Mike's bitch. To tell the truth, I worked with him on ten or twelve gigs and never learned to hate it - but then, I'm rather more flexible than the average stagehand.

And so it came to pass that in December, 1996 Mike somehow cajoled Triple A into having F/X do the honors of shepherding their incredibly expensive new corporate meeting set to its many scheduled destinations. He wanted to be the one to travel with it, but he knew that some destinations were better left to his bitch, me, when he had bigger gigs to fry. So when the fancy new set debuted at Disney's Contemporary Resort, he went there to begin this new position. He took me to learn the set along with him. Two guys from the Chicago company that designed and built it were to be there to show us how it's done.

Call time at the Contemporary: Sunday at noon. I, of course, showed up at 11:15. I found the big-ass function room scheduled for Triple A. As usual, there was a function already going on in there. With a lot of luck, they would finish up by noon or a little after. HA! So Mike came along, the designer-guys came along, the trucks from Chicago backed into the loading dock. Noon came and went, one, two...pretty normal show biz crapola. The Disney people were not willing to rush their guests out of there.

Mike and the designers decided to start bringing the stuff up the freight elevator from the dock. The biggest problem with that - several of the crates were too big to fit on the elevator! By 4:00 most of the set was upstairs, and Mike was huddled with the design guys sorting pieces and laying it out on the floor in an air-walled-off section of the ballroom. We even stood up the two screen surrounds just to be busy. Mike wanted to scoot them fully assembled fifty feet to the stage and lift them three feet in the air onto the stage. All of the rest of us kind of looked at him strangely, especially since the face of the set was sculpted foam with images of space travel and astronauts and planets and satellites and such. To grip this set firmly was to crush the thin shell of paint and pop holes in the sculpture with our fingers. We convinced Mike to reconsider.

Finally, a little after 5:00 the party broke up. The Disney Events Crew charged in to clear the room. Mike zeroed in on the leader of the pack. "You guys the ones bringing in the staging?" Mike asked. "Staging?" the guy mused. He got on his radio to headquarters. Of course no-one had ordered staging. But they could do it - for a slight extra fee - on a Sunday night! So we stretched our rear-projection screens, set up projection towers, assembled logos lights and microphones to the lectern, and unloaded the turntable parts to get them organized. It was after 9:00 when the stage was ready for us. We assembled the turntable centered at the rear (upstage) and installed the set pieces on it. This told us where the two screen surrounds should be placed. We did that.

The stuff on the turntable wobbled with the turning. We cabled the upper corners to the turntable floor to stabilize that. We washed our hands and added the pristine white flats and the very fragile Gatorfoam globe to the back side of the center section. We set in and shimmed up the triangular stage plugs on the corners of the rectangular staging pieces and velcroed up the facing pieces. We unpacked the big stage-wall AAA logos to install on the walls, and that's when Mike and the designers realized that these were the OLD logos - without the new blue orbits!

So, at about 2:30 in the morning, Mike and I headed to the shop with crude drawings of orbits to be cut out of blue PVC sheet stock. We drew them, I cut them on the band saw and we hauled ass back to Disney World. We installed orbits on all the logos and the day was saved. I went home at 5:30am. Mike stayed to meet the AAA cheeses. They walked in at 8:00, looked at the set and said, "How did those orbits get there? We don't start using the new logo until after the first of the year!"

Several days later, we were back at the Contemporary, disassembling the set, loading some parts back into the smaller crates, and busting up the way-too-big crates for disposal. Mike had talked them into letting me build wagons, one for the stage left screen surround, one for the stage right screen surround, one for the front center section, one for the white backside and fragile globe section, and one for the oddly shaped stage plugs and stage facing pieces. The intent was to have maximum flexibility from venue to venue - to be able to use whatever sections were needed to fill whatever space they were using, and to be able to load whatever wagons were needed each time. It was while I was working on this that I learned that in September this baby was going to London, England. I was pretty sure Mike would take that gig himself.

F/X ordered up a storage semi trailer dedicated to Triple A. As each wagon was finished and loaded, we rolled it into the trailer. The turntable already had a steel wagon, so it went on. I built a rolling box for the lectern. It went. When all was finished, it was apparent that a 40 foot trailer was just exactly big enough to handle the whole set. One of the guys working with me figuring out how to fit it all in there said that it was quite a puzzle - but in his Honduras accent it sounded like "quite a pus-hole." This became a buzz phrase at F/X that is still used today.

***

In January parts of the set went to Sawgrass Resort near Jacksonville. This was one that Mike was happy to pass off to me. I rented a Ryder Truck, backed it up to the semi, and loaded up the chunks I needed for this abbreviated version. The system worked. I drove it over on I-4, took I-95 up to Saint Augustine, then trundled up A1A all the way to Sawgrass. I backed 'er up to the loading dock, and quickly figured out that the three twelve-foot wagons were not going to make it out onto the six-foot-deep dock. Hmmm. There was a ramp from the back parking lot up to the side of the dock. Hmmm. Would my wagons roll down the metal ramp included in the truck? I kept my baloney lips zipped, took my two local helpers and drove the truck out to the middle of the space. We set the truck ramp and slowly rolled a wagon to the edge. It turned out that I couldn't possibly have put the wheels in a better place. They had an inch of clearance all the way, which made them very stable going down the ramp. Whew! We rolled them across the lot, up the ramp to the dock, and right into the ballroom, no problem. We set up one screen and the front center with no turntable - easy stuff - and the designer-guys helped me get my rental car to drive back to Orlando and then in a couple of days to drive back to Sawgrass. I guess Triple A figured out that this was their cheapest alternative over lodgings, truck driving mileage or whatever. So in a couple days I drove back, turned in my car, disassembled the set, loaded the wagons, rolled them out to the truck and headed home again. Easy gig.

***

In February a short round went to Miami. Mike was going to take this one, but in the interim Triple A called Mack, the owner of F/X, and told him that Mike had told them that he was going out on his own and wanted to take AAA with him. Suddenly, I was the only one at FX who knew the set. When I got to Miami I learned that the design guys from Chicago had been removed from the gravy train as well. Suddenly, I was the only one in the whole world who knew the set. Now if I could only hold out until September!

Two things stick in my mind about the Miami gig. First, I had to unload and load the truck in the front driveway of the hotel, and roll the wagons through the parking garage to the ballroom entrance. Many people were very unhappy about that. Then, after spending one night in the hotel and hanging out until early afternoon, I was able to strike the show, load up, and drive to Vero Beach by early evening and hang out with Craig and Linda Bowers for a couple of hours before continuing home. Nice.

***

The first Atlanta gig was a strange one. It was for another company that had seen the new, incredibly expensive Triple A set and asked to rent it for a show in Atlanta. They wanted the whole magilla minus the turntable, lectern and stage plugs, which I could just squeeze into a 24 foot Ryder - it was quite a pus-hole! It was a rainy March day when I drove my truck north. It was a rainy March evening when I arrived around 5:30, looking for the hotel during rush hour. I found it, but there was no parking anywhere near it. I circled it a few times, and was finally able to squeeze in on a side street and leave it there long enough to talk to the guys at the loading dock. "Where can I park it?" I asked. They shrugged. I went to the front desk and asked. They shrugged. I headed out the front door, passing the Doorman. "Where can I park my truck?" I asked. "The Days Inn next door will let you park it in their lot for a fee." Cool.

While I'd been gone, a Fed Ex truck had backed in behind me and tight to the curb. His rear end was actually between my truck's rear end and the curb. When I pulled away. the left rear corner of the Ryder scraped a lens off of the right rear corner light of the Fed Ex truck. I stopped, police were called, an accident report was written. Luckily, when I rented the truck I accepted the full insurance coverage. This came in very handy when the lawyer for the Fed Ex driver began weeks later to try to make a big liability thing out of it. Dumbass.

The next morning I retrieved the truck from the Days Inn, parked in almost the same spot as the night before, and with my local labor, easily rolled all of the wagons down to the street and onto the freight elevator. We were done before noon, I parked at the Days Inn again, and grabbed MARTA to the airport. This company flew me home to Orlando for the three days of the show, then back to Atlanta for the strike. Strike started at about five in the afternoon. I was not given a room for the night. I set out driving at eleven, and didn't crap out until 3:30 in the morning in north Florida. Not too bad for a forty four year old man.

To add insult to these injuries, when I went to the airport to retrieve my vehicle, it had a parking ticket on it because it was too long for the space and poked out into the drive a little too far. I was beginning to regret being the world's leading authority on the Triple A set.

***

Atlanta Two was no driving required. Those Triple A guys had figured out that if their own guy drove the truck and I flew, it saved them money. I really don't like driving, so that worked for me. There was a huge underground loading dock and truck parking lot at this venue. I believe I set up the whole thing for this show, and they didn't bring me back for the strike. The weirdest thing, though, was that Mike the Snake was there doing the lighting for them. Hmmmm.

***

In May the abreviated set went to New Orleans. They didn't want me at all other than to pull and help them load the chunks they needed. I was sad, but also a bit relieved. A week later, the truck came back with the set in a shambles. The strike crew had just flung the pieces onto the truck. The pieces were damaged and the wagons were damaged. The Triple A guys were not happy about their incredibly expensive set. They authorized F/X to make all necessary repairs, and give it a new paint job for London. They even sent us a half-set they had been using in europe, for us to refurbish and repaint to match the big guy. Then they were taking it away from us forever. Weeks later, all spiffy and sparkly again, the full big set was loaded onto a shipping container and sent to London.

Weeks after that, AAA called to say that they had a very limited time to install in London, and could I please come and take care of the set for them? I told Mack to tell them that if I could have a private room so my wife could come, I'd do it. Otherwise, never mind. They said, "Fine, but you're only there for install, not strike." I said "Fine, but fly me back on Thursday with the rest of the crew. My wife and I want to explore for a few days." "Fine." "Fine."

And so it came to pass that we got our passports in order and Carmen booked a round trip to London on Virgin Air. This cost hundreds less than flying Delta with the AAA bunch. I was on the Delta flight with the psyched-up church choir going to England to sing at some big shindig. They were practicing all the way. I left Friday morning, nearly a week after Princess Diana was killed, and arrived, totally sleepless, on Saturday morning.

There was some hullaballoo about road boxes of gear clearing customs or whatever. My tool box came through fine, and one lighting guy and I split a cab to the Hyatt Hyde Park. We arrived at the ballroom just in time to see the first pieces of the set come off the elevator. They were unloading the wagons down at the dock. Before the job was finished, they had dropped one center sculpted foam piece and popped several finger-sized holes in it. Right in the center.

Carmen arrived and we got her squared away in my room. She got right on the phone and began making reservations for tours. She booked us a Jack The Ripper Tour for that night. By supper time, the set was pretty much done except for the tweaking. One thing was preying on my mind: those holes in the center. What could I use to fill them? The surface was a mottled and pitted texture, so anything smooth would show up like a beacon. A sponge would work, but it would need to be whitish-greyish. Hmmm.

I had a hard time staying awake on the bus with the driver telling stories and offering theories about Jack The Ripper. We visited the pubs, we visited the crime scenes, and back on the bus I fought to stay awake. When we finally got back to the hotel, I slept like a baby.

The next morning I knew that the only really big challenge remaining was to fill those holes. I was sitting in the bathroom picturing something that could be compressed into the holes and painted or Sharpied to blend in. I was wadding up toilet paper in my hand...HEY! A few minutes later I was downstairs with my roll of toilet paper. I climbed the ladder, wadded up some balls of tp and stuffed them in the holes. I climbed down, looked up - and couldn't see the holes, at all. A stroke of brilliance.

Carmen went on a bus tour to Leeds Castle, Dover and Canterbury that day. I finished up everything I knew to do and sat in the corner of the ballroom. Soon the Technical Director woke me up and told me not to sleep in a chair in front of the client who was paying me to be there. I told him to let me know if there was anything else they needed from me, and went out for a long walk. I was pleased to find that I remembered my way around quite a bit of the city from my trip here 22 years ago when I was 22. (Four Plays)

Carmen returned in the late afternoon, bubbling over with enthusiasm about Leeds, Canterbury and the White Cliffs. We were hungry, so we asked the Concierge to recommend a moderately priced Italian Restaurant. He recommended Toto's. We grabbed a cab.

My only regret about this whole trip is that I didn't go back to the Hyatt, grab the Concierge by the lapels and ask him how expensive a meal would have to be to earn the rank of HIGH priced. Our dinner came to just over 100 pounds- way over 200 dollars! They put us upstairs in the Beverley Hillbillies section, where everyone wearing jeans was put. The up side: we were by the railing and could watch the fancy people down below, including Uma Thurman.

Early Monday morning we checked out of the Hyatt, leaving our luggage at the front desk. We had a good breakfast before our tour bus picked us up and took us to Stonehenge, Salisbury Cathedral and Bath.

Stonehenge is a little like the Grand Canyon. You can see photographs and movies, and you can hear and read descriptions, but until you actually see what those wacky Druids did all those thousands of years ago, the impact pales.

Salisbury Cathedral was very cool, lots of famous dead people entombed in there, beautiful architecture. The tour group was walking, walking from the cathedral to a pub for lunch, but Carmen wanted to linger in the gift shop and such. My job was to watch which way the group went so we could catch up. I watched them through five or six turnings out of the cathedral grounds, down this street, turn onto that street. I went beyond where Carmen could see me from the grounds, watched one more turn and headed back. By the time we set out to follow the group and we attained the last turn I'd seen, there was no sign of them or any pub. We guessed the next turn to no avail. Several college-age boys came down the street, so we asked them. Believe it or not, they knew exactly where the pub was. Lunch was crappy, by the way.

Bath was very cool as well. You know, seeing signs directing you to "Historic Downtown Orlando" loses all of its charm after you spend a day looking at a five thousand year old henge, a seven hundred year old cathedral and baths where the Romans bathed.

We returned to London during rush hour. Carmen got off at the Knightsbridge Hotel on Knightsbridge Street to check us in. I continued on to the Hyatt Hyde Park, collected our luggage and took a cab back. Once we had settled in we went out for a walk to explore our new neighborhood and find some dinner. We turned down Brompton Road and passed Harrod's with its chest-high heaps of flowers and gifts from mourners of Princess Di. Dinner was pizza at a much more moderately priced Italian restaurant than Toto's.

Tuesday's tour was called "The Historic And Modern London Tour," with yet another twinge for Orlandoans. "Modern" London was anything built since the fire of 1666. We saw all the usual stuff: the Changing of the Guard between chest-high heaps of flowers and other gifts all along the fences around Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey, lunch in Covent Garden, Saint Paul's Cathedral, Parliament, all that stuff. It ended with a boat ride from the Tower of London up the Thames to meet the bus and go home.

Wednesday, our last day, was a wandering day, a shopping day (yes, she bought pottery) and we had tickets to see "The Woman In Black" at a theatre near Covent Garden. She went to the Victoria And Albert Museum and gift shop. I walked to the Harley Davidson store (they don't sell motorcycles) and bought Harley Davidson London T-shirts for the three guys back at F/X who requested them. They had a special going: buy two, get one free! Then we went to St. Martin in the Fields, Picadilly Circus and back to the hotel to dress for the theatre.

The play was pretty good, with a couple of really chilling moments. After the show we went back to the hotel to pack for our sad departure. I disappointed Carmen by just going back to the hotel instead of coming out wild and crazy and telling the driver to take us to a fun night spot to close out our best vacation ever. So far.

I missed the best part of our return trips. I checked in at Delta first, then Carmen went by herself to check in at Virgin with her way-too-heavy carry-on bag of pottery that, hell no, she wasn't going to check it! She wouldn't even let ME carry it!

***

Soon we come to the end of the Triple A saga. It all came down to Time Change Weekend, Fall, 1997. A few weeks prior, the AAA guys asked Mack if I could come to Phoenix. They'd seen the loaded shipping container in London and weren't at all confident that the set would be in very good shape when the container got to Phoenix. They sent their truck to pick up the European half-set, and F/X was almost completely done with it.

I flew to Phoenix on Friday afternoon, and in the evening we opened the container. Their fears were not in vain. One screen surround flat was completely snapped in half! "What do we do now?" they lamented. My face lit up. It just so happened that that exact piece was duplicated in the European half-set! All day Saturday I installed the whole set, turntable and all, all by myself. I used half a roll of toilet paper, gaff tape, Sharpies- everything in the arsenal, and it looked good one last time.

On Sunday morning I knew the time had changed everywhere but Arizona. I got on the standby list at Delta, left four hours earlier than scheduled, flew from Mountain Time to Eastern Time, and had absolutely no idea what time it was when I got home. There were no parking tickets on my vehicle at the airport - life was good and Triple A was over!

Holes In The West

Now we jump ahead to 1993. I may think of a fascinating trip in between someday, or not. This was probably about a year after we saw the VHS tape of the movie "Grand Canyon," which kind of motivated us, plus my mother wanted to see the grand canyon before she died. Better than that, she wanted to see it by the light of a full moon.

Their Winnebago LeSharo, with the too-small Renault engine, had proven itself to be a failure. It was really too small for two people to be comfortable for a long trip. PLUS, there were, according to my dad, two kinds of trip in that thing: "the ones where we limp home, and the ones where we are towed home." They weren't going to Arizona in the Winnebago. That's a long tow to Florida.

In fact, there was nothing about their RV ownership experience that made us want to follow in their tread tracks. They were members of an RV network, Good Sam I believe was the name. The news letters were full of people trying to unload their expensive and maintenance-intensive monstrosities at a horrendous loss, and people wanting to rent their monstrosities to strangers, just to help with the payments and maintenance costs during the 95 percent of the time that they were not using it, watching it rot in the yard. Do I paint a clear picture of the joys of RV ownership?


So they called around and found a woman who was looking to rent out her Coachman Leprechaun, a twenty-six foot long box on a truck chassis with sleeping accomodations cantilevered out over the cab, a Class C motorhome. According to the owner it was "the last of the classic Cs." We met my parents over in Titusville one Sunday morning to inspect it and get the lowdown on all of the jazzy innovations her husband had invented for it. I wish I could remember what they were.


A couple of weeks later, on a Friday late morning in early May, my dad arrived in our driveway on Wisconsin Avenue in St. Cloud (our third and final residence in St. Cloud) driving "the last of the classic Cs." We loaded up our two weeks worth of gear and had a nice liesurely lunch before setting out on our last epic journey together.

My dad drove us north on the Turnpike to I-75 to I-10. It was time to pull into a rest area and have some supper. This is a given when traveling with my parents: you don't eat in restaurants, especially if there's a refrigerator and stove in your vehicle. As darkness was descending, Carmen took over the driving. After a while, my dad decided to go to their bedroom in the back of the box to try to sleep some. My mother went back there too, as there wasn't much to do or to look at on that long long haul across the panhandle of Florida in the dark. Soon we heard my mother giggling uncontrollably. We were greatly amused by the possible goings-on back there, but were disappointed to learn that the giggles were a result of the fact that the back bedroom, which hung way out beyond the back wheels, was pitching, rolling and bouncing like an E-Ticket ride (old time Disney World patrons will remember E-Ticket rides.)


Daylight the next morning found us in Louisiana and breakfast in a rest area. Lunch was in eastern Texas, and we pulled up in front of Carmen's mom and dad's house in Crosby, Texas in early afternoon. Olen came running out to help us get electricity and water to the RV and get 'er leveled up. Then we all went inside for conversation, a nice dinner and a real bed for Carmen and me - no giggling.

Sunday was Mother's Day. We both got to spend time with our (and each other's) mother. After a grand lunch and some more conversation, we loaded up and headed out. It was getting dark when we motored through San Antonio. The group agreed to pull off the interstate and drive by The Alamo. Nothing could have prepared me for it. It was like an old, oddly shaped storefront packed into a street lined with storefronts.

Since I brought up "the group," I should explain a few things about decision-making on this trip. We evolved a system during this adventure that has worked well for the four of us for all the years since. Each member of the group, when asked what they want to do, would answer, "Whatever the group wants." We figured out as time and mileage progressed, that my mother had three votes, Carmen had two votes, I had one vote, and my dad had no vote. In the event of a tie, Carmen and my mother would try to acquiesce to the other for a spell, until they (or my dad and I) got tired of it and swung the vote one way or the other.

Part of the plan all along was for the second stop to be Carlsbad Caverns. So we exited Interstate 10 at Fort Stockton early Monday morning and followed US 285 northwest into southeastern New Mexico, arriving in time for lunch. We secured our parking space in the campground, then followed the signs up a 600 foot tall hill and parked near the entrance to the 600 foot deep caverns. "We could have stayed down at the bottom of the hill and walked straight in!" I observed. We took the elevator down to ground level, and bought lunch at the concession stand deep inside the hill. So we did the caverns, which were very interesting. They had narration headphone thingies to tell the story of the caverns over many thousands of years, including the time a mere century or so ago when some entreprenurial humans busted into the side of the hill and extracted bat guano for sale as fertilizer. "See?" I said.

It was miserably hot when we came back up and drove back down. We hooked up to the electricity and ran the air conditioner full blast, barely making a dent in the stiffling interior heat. We blew the breaker on the panel three times. But as a wise and wonderful person once said to me, "When the sun goes down, it cools off." In the early evening Carmen and I walked down to the gift shops over by the road. When we returned to the campsite, there was a mule deer wandering the grounds. We roused my dad to come see it, but it wasn't near enough to see in the dark. Later, when we walked down to the bathrooms, there were several mule deer licking the floors in the showers. I guess you get your water where you can in an arid environment.

Tuesday morning after breakfast we packed the Leprechaun for the final push to the canyon. We mosied on up 285 to Roswell, where we saw no aliens that we knew were aliens, and turned left onto US 380. It was getting close to lunch time when we saw signs for the Valley Of Fires National Recreation Area. We turned off the highway and drove into a strange and beautiful place. The Valley is as green and lush as any place I've seen in New Mexico, but with ridges of black volcanic rock poking out of the green, looking like plowed furrows in the landscape. So we ate lunch without taking any pictures of this magical place, and moved on. Hey, I live in New Mexico now. I could nip down there any time I want. It's only about a hundred fifty miles from Albuquerque.

We crossed the Continental Divide at about 8:00 Tuesday night. Not long after, we pulled off for gas. We entered the Parking Lot of Potholes leading to a truck stop. I was driving, trying my best to avoid the big, deep holes, but there were just too many. The front right wheel went down, and the Leprechaun pitched hard to the right, popping open the cabinets on the left side. It straightened up in time for the left side to go down, popping open the cabinets on the right. While I pumped the gas, the others were busy picking up all the crap that had come flying out of the cabinets.

We were all getting pretty sleepy in the wee hours of the morning. We pulled into the rest area near the Meteor Crater and grabbed some shuteye. The next morning, on the way to the restrooms, Carmen spotted a tiny bunny in the huge rock arrangement by the building. It was very cute, and it just sat there. I guess it was accustomed to gawking tourists. The other thing that happened there was that we decided to go to the meteor crater on the way back east. Tonight was the full moon, so we didn't want to dally.

We reached the campground at the village of Grand Canyon around mid-morning. We secured our space, then drove to the nearest parking lot at the rim of the canyon. I could spend all day describing the grandeur of this massive hole in the ground, but until you are there you can't begin to get a sense of its awe-inspiring size and beauty. So go.

The only shoes I brought for this adventure were my flip flops. Walking the trail along the rim of the canyon is not a task best done in flip flops. By the time we returned to the campground, my feet had canyons of their own cracking open in my heels.


My dad and I were ready for a shower, so we walked down to the bathrooms only to find that the showers were coin-operated, four quarters for five minutes. He went back to the RV, and I went to the trading post, both of us seeking quarters. By the time I returned, he was done with his shower and back in the RV.

After resting awhile and eating our supper we cast off lines (electric and water) and went back to the rim. We found ourselves places to sit on the rocks, and watched the sun set and the full moon rise over the canyon. Very beautiful.

Carmen and I wanted to go to the Ranger Talk that evening, so we were dropped off at the Visitors' Center on the way back to the campsite. We were early, so we did some shopping at the trading post before following the trail to the outdoor theater. The ranger had a slide presentation about the history, geology and wonderfulness of the canyon. Two aspects of this presentation struck us as odd: his visual aid for the layered geology of the region was a Milky Way candy bar; and his segues into arial views of the canyon were pictures of him dressed as Superman! Silly boy.

Thursday morning we packed 'er up for the return trip, which now included the Meteor Crater as well as a short visit to West Helena to introduce the parents to Carmen's grandmother. So we took our sweet time leaving, driving up to Desert View, across the Painted Desert, through the Petrified Forest with several stops to check out petroglyphs and such, and then backtracked on the Interstate to the Meteor Crater. It was definitely the smallest hole we saw on this trip, but pretty cool nonetheless. If you saw the movie "Starman," you got a pretty good look at it.

It was getting late by the time we finished our tour of the crater, so my mother was searching her campground guide for a place to spend the night. She found a place north of Holbrook, AZ called Buzzard's Gulch. The guide gave it a 4 out of 5 points for scenic beauty. When we arrived, we could easily see why. There was brown dirt stretching to the horizon in all directions save one: the dumpsters and air conditioning units on the back side of a shopping center. Carmen and I walked over to the shopping center and bought me a pair of cheap sneakers, some socks and some moisturizer to try to repair my cracked and bleeding heels. We plugged in the cable to the TV and watched the news. The weather report told us that the humidity was a crackling fifteen percent.

Friday morning we had a liesurely breakfast, unhooked ourselves and set out. By the time we made our way to New Mexico, we were thinking about lunch. We began seeing signs for Red Rock Park. We exited the Interstate near Gallup and followed the signs north to the park and The Red Rock Museum. Large in the landscape was an enormous red rock, hundreds of feet tall and hundreds of feet wide. When we arrived at the museum parking lot, there were no other vehicles anywhere in sight. I got out and walked up to the glass museum doors. They were locked, but I could see in. The doors on the far side were also glass, and just a few feet beyond them was the enormous red rock. Good thing there was a museum there to showcase that rock. But it was closed. We ate our lunch and moved on.


We crossed the rest of New Mexico stopping only for gas and one misbegotten dinner at a diner on Historic Route 66. We drove all night through the Texas panhandle. I was driving through Amarillo. The gas tank was getting low and I was thinking about stopping, but didn't. A long long stretch of nothing but nothing went by, and we made a critical decision to turn around when we had just enough gas to get us back to Amarillo. Good thing, too, because the next gas station east was at Shamrock, about a hundred miles away.

It was mid-morning Saturday when we pulled off the Interstate about fifty miles into Oklahoma. We spent two nights at Foss State Park on Foss Lake, watching the Mississippi kites soar the skies and the scissor-tail flycatchers dart after flies. All this time we had been on the lookout for roadrunners, but had seen none. Oklahoma was no exception.

Monday afternoon, after the long drive across Oklahoma, we camped for the night at Horsehead Lake in the White Rock Wildlife Management Area at the southern end of the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. It was a gorgeous, lush place, especially after the dry brownness of Arizona and New Mexico. I went for a long walk - my heels felt much better. We saw goldfinches, a scarlet tanager and a bluebird. That evening, Carmen found a luna moth on the floor in the restroom. She enticed it onto her finger and carried it around for a while. Eventually it gathered the strength to fly. It fluttered about ten feet away before a blue jay streaked out of a tree and nailed it.


Tuesday morning we cast off again, making a side trip to Devil's Den State Park. As we were driving down the access road to the park, a roadrunner came running up onto a log and on up to the top of a branch sticking up. It posed there for a moment as we roared by. At last, a roadrunner - in Arkansas?

Tuesday evening, after the three hundred mile trip across Arkansas, we pulled up in front of Mum Mum's house. Olen came running out to help us get electricity and water to the RV and get 'er leveled up. "Didn't we just see you in Texas?" my dad asked. Yes, we did. Hmmmm.

We visited with Mum Mum, had dinner at the Golden Corral (Where Carmen had worked as a "Steerette" in her youth) and went to visit Evil Sister Tammie and her daughter Nikki at their house nestled in the woods a few miles away. Nikki did a fancy dance routine for us in her cowboy boots. Back at Mum Mum's Carmen and I had a shower and a real bed to sleep in before the push for home.

Of course, the push for home included one more stop. There was a CCC park in southern Alabama, Frank Jackson State Park, that the parents wanted to check out. My dad's brother Bob had worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression, and my dad has a soft spot for CCC parks. And it was a very nice park and very nice campground. The big thing I remember was on the way there, on Interstate 65 south of Montgomery, the truck in front of us had one of his tires disintegrate, shooting rubber projectiles all over the front of The Last Of The Classic Cs.

I don't remember anything about the trip from Jackson State Park to St. Cloud, other than our last dinner in a rest area east of Tallahassee, for which I drained the macaroni and the lid came off the pasta pot and dumped macaroni into the RV sink. I believe we pulled in late on Friday night, reacquainted ourselves with our kitties Harvie and Ms. Mouse, and went to bed in our own bed.

On Saturday morning we washed down the Leprechaun, had a last lunch together, and my parents drove away to Titusville to trade the RV for their car, and went home.

Too Much Vacation

This is a long one, which is why I've been putting it off. It was the summer of 1989, when we lived in "Green Acres," a tumble-down old wood and palmetto bug house on 9th Street in St. Cloud, our second residence in Central Florida and the first place we bought. We actually bought it while I was still at the plant nursery. It was the subject of a closing Carmen was working up at Land Title And Survey, and the deal fell through. The price was 27,000. She couldn't pass it up. John Geip was aghast that one of his lowly grunts would be so uppity as to own "proppity."

Anyway, despite many stories I could tell about this house, I'll get on with the story at hand. My parents had bought a used RV, a Winnebago LeSharo (kind of a long van with a wide body and a too-small Renault engine) and were itching to take it out for a long trip. Their little red dog Maggie was itching to go as well.

I was still suffering under the delusion that I was going to write a Civil War Blockade Runner story, so I wanted to see Wilmington, NC and Fort Fisher, near there. I also wanted to see Charleston, SC. We also wanted to visit the same friends as always, the Shetrones and the Buinickases in Maryland. Carmen wanted to visit her grandmother in Arkansas again. So this trip would cover ten states in sixteen days. My parents wouldn't go all the way to Arkansas, so they would go straight home to Vero Beach from Maryland.

We packed our little Corrolla full of camping gear and clothes, put a rack on the back for two bicycles (Carmen's and Brandon's) and lit out in the early afternoon, leading the way. Our first night was in Savannah, and we three decided not to pitch a tent that night. We stayed in a motel while the parents and Maggie hooked up in an RV campground.

Day two we stopped off to take a boat tour of Charleston Harbor while the parents plowed ahead to the Wilmington area. This was years before any of us got cellular phones, so when we finally got to Wilmington, we were flabberghasted to find that the campground we were all going to stay in was closed. How were we ever going to find each other now? We turned around and headed back to a little shopping center we had passed to use the bathroom and buy some snacks. As we were getting ready to pull out of the parking lot, the Winnebago went by, headed back to the closed campground looking for us. We chased them down and we all pulled off the road. They had checked in at another campground nearby and reserved an adjacent space for our first night in the tent. Whew!

Day three: the parents and Brandon went on to the Cedar Island campground while Carmen and I explored Wilmington, visited the museum, and went to the overgrown site of Fort Fisher. This was all very exciting for me to actually be there in the presence of so much of the history of the Blockade. Carmen tolerated it pretty well. We mosied on to Cedar Island and set up the tent again. This was right on the ocean and Pamlico Sound- very nice, breezy, quiet. We liked it.

Day four my parents declared that our next stop needed to be at least two nights. We took the ferry over to Cape Hatteras, drove some, ferried a few more times and stopped up near Kitty Hawk for two nights. We went to the Wright Brothers Museum on day five, and the bicyclists and Maggie got a good workout that day.

Day six saw us go through Virginia up US 17 to US 301, across that one dollar Eisenhower Bridge (see "A New Adventure Every Day" at the beginning of this blog) and on up through Maryland where we all (except Carmen, Brandon and Maggie) had spent so much of our lives. As it turned out, this almost worked against us. We were confident going into familiar territory, but it had changed so much in twenty one years that we were totally disoriented.

I don't remember how long we stayed at the Shetrone house. On Saturday Sharyn and Don loaded their kids, Brandon and me into their van and we went on one of their standard day trips to Rocks State Park in the mountains. (It's funny now to sit here in Albuquerque and remember the "mountains" of Maryland) There are trails up to the "King and Queen Seat" at the top of a mountain, and it was on our way up there that Brandon uttered the famous line, "Follow me! I know where I'm going!" when he had never been there before in his life. A couple of days were spent by my dad and Don trying to fix the generator in the RV. Anyway, it was several days before we parted company with Mother, Dad and Maggie and set out for Arkansas.

We went around Washington to Interstate 66 over to I 81 and spent the night in Bristol, Virginia. We asked at the front desk if there was a Walmart nearby. "It's in Tennessee," she replied. We were crestfallen. "Across the street." Bristol, Tennessee is across the main street from Bristol, Virginia. I guess the locals love to catch up tourists with that stuff.

The next day was the long slog across the length of Tennessee, turn left at Memphis, sixty miles south to Lula, Mississippi and across the bridge to Helena, Arkansas. Except the long, high bridge was being repaired, so instead of two lanes, it was down to one. There was a signal light to tell us it was the westbound turn to go. It told us to go. We went. Luckily there was nobody behind us, because over the top came an eastbound semi straight at us at a high rate of fuel consumption. After we screamed and panicked, we backed back down the east side and let the semi keep going.

The big news in the twin cities of Helena and West Helena, was that there was now a Taco Bell, pronounced TOCKobell. Everybody we encountered announced proudly, "We got a TOCKobell." It rivaled the time, in Carmen's high school years, when they got a MACKdonalds.

So we visited Carmen's Mum Mum and evil sister Tammie and pre-evil niece, Nikki for a few days, then high-tailed it home through Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. We came close to making it in one shot, but in White Springs, Florida, Carmen pooped out. It was nearing midnight, and about three hours from home. We had her father's Union 76 credit card for gas, and there in White Springs was a Union 76 Motor Lodge. We spent the night.

The last day was Brandon, bored, tired and missing his mom, singing a little song all the way down I 75 and the Florida Turnpike. It went, "Going up a big hill, going up a big hill, going up a big hill, top of a big hill, going down a big hill, going down a big hill, going on a flat part, going on a flat part..." you get the picture. All the way home.

We finally drove up to the entrance to our driveway, to be faced with a pile of rubble. "What's that in our carport?" asked Carmen. "Oh, crap, it IS our carport!" We sold the house a couple of months later.