Vacation Hard!: Part 3 - Ex-traneous.....Ex-acerbating..........Ex-plosive!!

First a gentle reminder. If you experience any of the following:
Easily hurt and/or compromised feelings
Extreme religious and/or political opinions and mentality
Diarrhea of the mouth while suffering the above afflictions
Please do not read my blog.

If you have an aversion to cursing, violence, sex, destruction of property, having a sense of humor, or Article 19 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights please do not read my blog.

If you dislike or have difficulty understanding satire/sarcasm, just don't even bother. Nobody likes you anyway.

Awesome blog reading discretion has been advised. Don't be mad, Boo.

"It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'As pretty as an Airport' appear."
-- Douglas Adams

We finally land in San Antonio. "Deplaning", as it's called in the biz, is super awesome. It's where the passengers in the middle and back of the plane wait for 20 minutes for the people in the front to remember that they have luggage in the overhead bins.......oh yeah......and common sense. And if you can get them to remember both at the same time it's a magical event. Like watching whales fucking or something.

I'm walking out of the terminal keeping an eye out for my good friend Ann, who I've called "Bunny" ever since she was a baby nurse that I had to train to do all the wrong stuff (she's subsequently moved past my 'Dark Side' training style and will now tell you how awesome she is at high volume). She said she'd pick me up for lunch before I headed home with my Dad. As I walk out, she's hiding off to one side, like she was going to let me pass and then yell at me from behind and then be all butt-hurt because I didn't recognize her. Then she would have leverage (among women's favorite things to have besides "babies" and "sparklies") to be able to say things like, "HEY, remember that time that I went to pick you up at the airport and you didn't even recognize me?! Yeah, so go buy me something sparkly to assuage my grief over that shit."



After gathering my things from the "oops, we smashed your shit" conveyor belt, we walk outside. The built up heat latent in my bones and skin from all the lava daggers everybody on the plane was shooting me with their devil eyes collided with the oppressive South Texas heat and I burst into flames. Then Bunny politely informs me that she forgot where she parked. This situation sounds vaguely familiar.......



This is the story of The Journey to Find The Bunny's Car.

Day 1:

While I had packed very well for this unexpected and ardorous journey and felt I was best prepared for the worst of conditions, I would have never guessed that as we trekked across the vastness of the San Antonio International Airport parking structure (3 fucking levels, Bunny. REALLY?!) that I would be on fire. I had left all my flame retardant clothing at home.

Day 2:
She drove up behind me as I was searching the same row for the 2nd time because that tricky bitch probably knew where the car was the whole time and was doing this to me to seek revenge for us losing touch for like 5 years or whatever it was. I got in and the flames were intantly extinguished because she started talking and laughing and all the oxygen was sucked out of the car. We had a good chat on the way to lunch and we're laughing the whole time because seperately we're funny, but together our comedy is magical. Like watching two monkeys hump a football or something.



We finish up at Lorenzo's "Fo' Realz" Italian and I call my Dad for a place where we can meet. Now, talking to Larry about anything that involves a specific event to take place at a future time is never easy; the man lives to fuck with me, questioning everything, but mostly directions and spelling (I learned the NATO phonetic alphabet just so he'd never be able to screw with me about spelling: "Did you say C or D?", "CHARLIE, Dad!! Fucking CHARLIE!!"). I would share further about that interesting dynamic, but that's a whole blog unto itself and I have shit to do today, so let's skip to the part where Bunny is driving me to the Wal-Greens and I say, "You watch, my Dad's gonna give me some shit about my hair. You should ask him about the time he introduced me as his daughter to a bunch of his Navy buddies when I was in the 10th grade".

We sit waiting for him and Bunny asks if I know what he drives. I tell her that if she just watched for the shittiest piece of shit rolling into the parking lot, that'd be him. Because anybody who's got a mechanic family member or friend knows that all their customer's cars are nice and they drive shit that's just about to fall apart. So anyway he totally fooled me by rolling up in a not-so-bad (for now) Nissan Frontier. We get out of the car and I introduce Bunny to my Dad. And this man, who I haven't seen in 2 years, doesn't say, "Hello, son. How was your flight?" or any of that cordial shit normal white movie parents say to their kids. Dad says, "You gonna go with your hair like that?" So after I indignatly holler "SEE!! I freakin' TOLD YOU!!" and when Bunny stops laughing, Dad asks, "What's the name of your band again?"

"I'm not in a band."

"Oh, then I guess it's time for a fucking hair cut then, huh?"

On the next episode of Vacation Hard!:   I been workin' on a Night Train......drinkin' coffee, takin' C17H21NO4..........

".......it's safe to say that's a lot of dick."

Vacation Hard!: Part Deux. Pronounced "Doo". That's gross French people.....grow up.

First a gentle reminder. If you experience any of the following:
Easily hurt and/or compromised feelings
Extreme religious and/or political opinions and mentality
Diarrhea of the mouth while suffering the above afflictions
Please do not read my blog.

If you have an aversion to cursing, violence, sex, destruction of property, having a sense of humor, or Article 19 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights please do not read my blog.

If you dislike or have difficulty understanding satire/sarcasm, just don't even bother. Nobody likes you anyway.

Awesome blog reading discretion has been advised. Don't be mad, Boo.




After being dropped off at the airport, getting checked in and passing through TSA, I get to my gate and begin waiting. Waiting at the gate to board your plane can be pretty interesting because you can spy on the people you're going to be traveling with before you board, getting to know who you may or may not have to kill on the airplane. It's pretty early, so nobody's talking like usual, but what they do is look around to assess the fellow traveler situation. This is never good for me because I'm a very large man. Tall and wide. To give you a general idea, not a single player in the NFL weighs as much as I do (I outweigh the heaviest listed by about 15lbs.) and I can only stand up competely straight in a 747 or larger aircraft. Needless to say, it sucks to sit next to me and it's quite a source of shame. I try to make myself as accomadating as possible, but it's not easy. Asking me not to invade your space in a sardine can like airplane seat is like asking a man with the worst case of food poisoning ever to stop shitting. So some of these people, sensing the seriousness of my girth, took to lashing out in my general direction with variations of stink eye.

 

 

 

Fortuately, I had purchased the Southwest "Early Bird" boarding pass, which allowed me to be among the first to board thus ensuring I'd have enough time to get settled before people started cramming up the airplane. Southwest has the policy to allow passengers to choose their own seats which is both a blessing and a curse, because toward the end of the boarding process you'll inevitably have a family with small children who did not board right away (even the Early Bird people can't board before parents with small children and the disabled) and now they can't sit together and the flight attendants will ask that people start giving up seats. They will not allow the plane to leave until several good samaratans, in a fit of kindness (or impatience) get up and move for these people. Well, my fat ass wasn't getting up, because I almost had my seat belt on. Yes, I'm one of those sorry assholes who needs a belt extender becasue I miss being able to buckle my airplane seat belt by like this  ________  much, depending on the size of your computer screen. Because of this I refuse to eat anything on the flight, but really it's mostly because I can't lower the tray table down all the way because my knees are pressed up against the seat in front of me. God forbid the person in that seat wants to recline it at all. I had a guy once who slamed his back repeatedly into the seat thinking it was stuck and then looked at me with an "eat shit" look when I asked him to stop.

 

 

 

People would pass me in the isle and the looks I got were either in disbelief or disgust. And it's funny to me because they'd look at the empty seat next to me and then up at me and I could read them like an open book because I chose to look each one of them in the face like an open challange to "sit here and lick my elbows". I was the last person anyone on that flight sat next to. I completely understand why, but it still kinda hurts to know that I was the one that sucked the most out of a couple hundred people, but I still have nothing to blame but my intense love for ice cream and otherwise awesome genetics.

 

 

 

Finally, a woman made her way into my row to sit next to me. "Hi," I said. "Grunt," she replied and glared at me as if she was trying to make me burst into flames with the power of her mind. She plopped down into the seat with a look of obvious defeat. Turns out she's a nurse too and we talked shop for a while until I had to answer "the question": "No, I'm an LVN" being the answer. After that the conversation died down considerably, which was fine with me because she just wanted to talk about how allergic she was to everything and how badly the hospital she worked at had been treating her. Gosh lady, it must really suck to have a degree and a hospital job in a down economy.

 

 

I catch my connecting flight in Denver and board a plane with about 20 vacant seats, so this time I had a whole row to myself, but somehow still suffered a few disparaging looks from passer-bys in the isle. Why people be hatin' on big folks? You know I can literally throw you little shitheads, right?

 

 

 

 

Next time on Vacation Hard!: Ex-traneous.....Ex-acerbating..........Ex-plosive!!

 

 

"........This is the story of The Journey to Find The Bunny's Car.........Day 1......"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

VACATION HARD!! - This time it's personal with a vengency like aftertaste!!!!

First a gentle reminder. If you experience any of the following:
Easily hurt and/or compromised feelings
Extreme religious and/or political opinions and mentality
Diarrhea of the mouth while suffering the above afflictions
Please do not read my blog.

If you have an aversion to cursing, violence, sex, destruction of property, having a sense of humor, or Article 19 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights please do not read my blog.

If you dislike or have difficulty understanding satire/sarcasm, just don't even bother. Nobody likes you anyway.

Awesome blog reading discretion has been advised. Don't be mad, Boo.





Part 1:

Nothing ever goes as planned on vacation. EVER. Overestimated possibility for fun and recreation. Underestimated financial cost and potential for physical and/or emotional injury. This is the tale of my super-duper awesome vacation. All events depicted herein are mostly true, except for the parts where I'm having fun. Also I didn't change any body's names cause they're all guilty as shit.




Ellie & The Plan



I love Ellie. She's my travel agent. That's right, I said travel agent.....who's your travel agent? Captain Kirk? Yeah, that's what I thought.

 

Ellie is a serious travel pimp. She won't even talk to me about places she's never been, unlike most travel agents who'll blow sunshine up your ass about cruises and third world countries they've never been to. Ellie's been on a real vacation in nearly every major US and European city. Who goes to Buffalo, N.Y. on vacation? Travel pimps, that's who.



She handled the details of my slightly complicated travel plans with pimp like smoothness: multi-destination flights for me, round trip flight for my folks, hotel stay in D.C., and a two day D.C. tour, not to mention fielding all my stupid questions, which is a feat in itself:



Dan: "Thank you so much for getting all this taken care of, Ellie. I think next year I want to go on a trip to Japan."

Ellie: "That's nice"

Dan: "Aren't you going to tell me about your package to Japan?"

Ellie: "I don't have one and I really don't think you should go there."

Dan: "Why not?!"

Ellie: "Daniel.......they've had a nuclear reactor explode very near most of the hot tourist destinations and something like five major earthquakes in the last six months. I'd hold off for a couple of years."

Dan: "But Pat Robertson hasn't said anything about them making deals with the devil, so it would totally be ok for me to visit, right?"

Ellie: "I don't recommend you go to Haiti either."

Dan: "I guess I'll just have to stick with Guatemala and Southern Mexico."

Ellie: "Why do you want to die so badly?"

Dan: "For kick ass pictures, of course."

Ellie: "Let me tell you about traveler's insurance........."

Vacation: Day 1



Getting all your crap ready for travel can be a daunting task if you let it be. Personally, for this trip, I didn't even buy my luggage until the day before I left and packed everything in about a half an hour because I'm not a fancy lady. Initially I had planned on carrying everything on the plane so things would go more smoothly, but in reading the TSA's short novel of compiled lists of shit you can't bring on an airplane, "Camera Tripod" was one of those things that was on the fence, so I decided that I'd be checking it, knowing full well that it'd be a miracle if it or anything in that bag even functioned when it came back into my possession (IF it came back into my possession).




I went to bed early so I could wake up around 0330 for a flight that didn't leave until after 0700. I do this because I'm paranoid about my ride to the airport. This is why I rarely enlist the help of friends to get me to the airport on time, because why should they have to suffer my horrible attitude and timeliness issues? I can yell at a shitty cab driver, though.

The cabbie shows up 10 whole minutes early and calls me: "Uh, so you're cab is here. I been sitting out here for like 5 minutes." Calm and ever polite I say "Oh, thank you. I'll be right out." - but really I won't because......I mean......mind your tone, asshole. So I did what my mother often referred to as "dilly-dally". I triple checked some things and went pee, even though I didn't really need to go, just so I could make that shit can wait a little longer. Then I go out and get loaded up and hop in the front seat and find the real source of his irritation: "Who goes to the airport at four in the fucking morning, dude?"

 

 

My normal response here would be, "Your Mom", but I was more concerned with making sure I got where I needed to go on time and that all depended on Mr. Tudy-Pants cab driver, and I know how crafty some of these fuckers can be about getting you anywhere in a timely manner, so I just kept my trap shut and gave him a look that said either, "If I wanted to go to your Mom's vagina at four in the morning, you're gonna take me, cause I'm paying you, dicklicker," or "I have a large fecal mass occupying the majority of my lower intestine and if we don't get the FUCK ON OUT, I'm going to evacuate it inside of your cab."

 

 

And that seemed to get things moving.

 

 

On the next episode of Vacation Hard!: Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis?!

 

 

".......sit here and lick my elbows."

 

Vacation Blog Prologue

 

First a gentle reminder. If you experience any of the following:
Easily hurt and/or compromised feelings
Extreme religious and/or political opinions and mentality
Diarrhea of the mouth while suffering the above afflictions
Please do not read my blog.

If you have an aversion to cursing, violence, sex, destruction of property, having a sense of humor, or Article 19 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights please do not read my blog.

If you dislike or have difficulty understanding satire/sarcasm, just don't even bother. Nobody likes you anyway.

Awesome blog reading discretion has been advised. Don't be mad, Boo.

Vacationing is always an iffy thing for me. People think I'm crazy when I get nervous about going on vacation, but nearly every vacation I've ever been on results in either serious personal issues or injury. Not kidding. Here is a short list of absolutely true events that occurred during my vacations:

1) September 1996: A naive 19 y/o Dan is commissioned to help a good friend and his Mother move from my hometown, Kingsville, Texas to their hometown, Baltimore, Maryland. We drove a U-Haul van all the way up and had a pretty fun time from my recollection, but what sucked was Hurricane Edouard was on its way up to that area and there was a cold front coming in from the west at the same time. All that change in weather caused a serious head cold, which I carried with me when I flew out, which played hell with my sinuses and destroyed one ear drum, causing mild permanent hearing loss and what looked like miscarried alien babies coming from my nostrils for a couple of weeks. Rotting on the inside while you aren't able to hear people tell you how horrible you look was never in the vacation plan.

 

 

2) October 2002: I took a trip up to Peoria, Illinois to see my girlfriend at the time, who was completing an internship at a hospital in the area. I stayed in the male dorms the first night I was there to help keep the cost of vacation down. I also bathed in the communal shower there (which made me feel like I was in prison) with a polite young Indian man who apparently had FUCKING CHICKEN POX......which I never had as a child, growing up mostly over seas where people don't get sick very often (one of the few advantages of living in the tropics). I spent the next four days alternating between laying in a bath tub full of aveno and oozing pus all over my nice hotel bed. I had fucking chicken pox lesions in my ears and on my nutsack, for fuck sake. What fun.

 

 

 

 

3) November 2006: My good friend Laura was graduating dive school and I went down to Houston to watch her graduation and see my Dad and second family. At the time my marriage wasn't doing so well and in August of that year I had made the incredibly ignorant decision to reply to a post on Craigslist of a woman who seemed interesting to me, because my lapses in judgement may be few and far between, but they're pretty fucking legendary. Needless to say it was a totally dumb and I regretted it immediately, but moved on. The night Laura graduated I got a call from my wife telling me she'd found that email in my outbox (there was no reply by the woman) and so pretty much nailed the coffin shut on our already failing marriage. Certainly not a shining moment in the history of vacation or fidelity.

 

 

 

 

4) September 2009: After my Dad and his wife Irma were up to visit the beautiful (and at the time dry) Pacific Northwest, I was helping my then girlfriend move into my apartment. As I was coming down the stairs with my billionth load of stuff, I tripped and fell down about four steps, spraining both ankles and tearing ligaments in both feet (interesting how you can actually hear a popping sound when that happens). I landed on my elbows and knees and cried like a little girl, mostly cause I knew I was fucked with both of my ankles sprained. I was out of work for an extra five days and layed around feeling sorry for myself and wondering what the fuck it was about vacation that bad shit always seemed to happen. Aside from the 2006 vacation, none of it was really my fault. I'm just as careful and aware as any other time during the year, so I don't really get it. Maybe my negative karma comes due only during vacation, or something more sinister is working behind the scenes to ensure I never actually have fun during a time when fun is the only thing on the agenda. Whatever it is, I'm very leery about taking vacation and now you see why.

 

 

 

 

In 2010 into early 2011 my Dad, Larry, was having serious health problems which I won't elaborate on because he's going to read this some day and call me up to tell me "all those people don't need to know my business". Anyway, I think these problems finally gave him a sense of mortality, because he finally agreed to stop his "busy life" and come with me on vacation.  Washington D.C. was where he wanted to go and that's where we went........

 

 

 

 

Hilarity fucking ensues. I guess I never learn.......