Vacation

We just returned from a 10 day vacation and I need a vacation to re-coop from the vacation!  We went to Hot Springs, AR for Ben's family reunion on Lake Hamilton.  It's a little hard to return to reality when you've been on jet skis, in swimming pools, riding in boats and eating out  the whole time.  Why can't we live in a perpetual vacation and go to reality occasionally?  It started off a little rough.  Ben got home an hour early and said that we needed to leave right then!  I explained to him that all of my favorite underthings and night clothes were in the washer and had to be dried.  When Ben is ready to go, he's ready to go!  My solution was to hang my bras, panties, and nightgowns all over the van draped over seats etc. so they could dry on the 17 hour drive.  It works very well although I will warn you that you can get a few weird looks when someone is passing you on the interstate!  Twenty minutes into the trip our grandson Corben said,"Can we turn around and go home now?"  Five miles later grand-daughter Madi throws up and an emergency stop is made on I-81.  The rest of the trip down was uneventful if you can call eating No Dose pills like M & M's,  stopping every 45 minutes to get a drink and then having to go to the bathroom because you stop every 45 minutes to get a drink!  I guess we could have done what that 44 year old woman that drove from Texas to Florida did and just wear a Depends undergarment.  We wouldn't have had to stop as often but if you're like me you'd rather wait until you can't change your diaper yourself before you want to wear one again!  Anytime one of my kids makes me mad, I just tell them that they are the one I have selected to change my  diapers in my old age!  It was a better trip than the time we took a 3ft. long ball python home to Magnolia, AR from Winchester, VA on Christmas Day in a pillow sack!  It was a present for my nephew Charlie who had accidentally cooked his snake Delilah under a heating lamp and it {the snake} wasn't holding up very well being placed in the freezer and taken out every morning to lay frozen stiff by my nephew while he bawled his eyes out over his Cheerios!  I hate snakes as I've said before but we just can't have our nephews crying every morning in their cereal over a cooked snake!  The pet store said to put him/her {how do you tell a female snake from a male snake?  That might be a future blog} into a pillow case and tie the top in a knot.  Supposedly a snake will not move around or strike at something when it can't see it.  Did I just say strike--I must have been out of my mind to have taken that boy home a snake for Christmas!  Everything was suppose to go smoothly until after said snake is bought and can't be returned {imagine that--someone wanting to get rid of a snake.} The seller tells me that the snake can't get below a certain temperature so we have to carry it into the restaurants with us instead of leaving it in the car while we eat!  For some unknown reason, none of my family wanted to have any part of this scheme so I was stuck putting the pillow case inside my coat while we ate on the trip.  We found that there are very few places open to eat at on Christmas Day and also a scary amount of gas stations that are closed. We finally found a Waffle House open in Tennessee and went inside to wait on a table.  It was snowing outside, 20 something degrees, and people were lined up out the door because of the lack of open restaurants.  I have a wicked sense of humor!  Out of the blue,  I realized that I knew how I could clear that place out quickly!  I told Ben that all I had to do was go into the ladies room, take the 3 ft long snake out of the pillow case, put the pillow case in my pocket and walk out of the bathroom holding that ball python saying, "look what I found in the bathroom!"  I didn't do it because it isn't polite to make a lot of people pee themselves, leave their food before it's eaten, or break an arm or a leg running out of a restaurant!  My mama raised me better than that. I wish that someone would have told the snake that he wasn't suppose to move inside the pillow case though.  He moved so much trying to get warm that I was afraid I  would be suspected of shoplifting when we stopped at a Stuckey's early the next morning for breakfast.  When one minute you have no 8" x 12" bulge under your coat and the next minute you do, it can look like you helped yourself to a large box of pecan rolls!  We had the best time ever in Hot Springs.  I always told my children that "family is a little bit of Heaven God let's us see on earth."  It was great seeing everyone and spending time with our kid's and grand kids.  The trip home was rough and took 22 hours of driving.  It involved 2 flat tires, leaving a trailer with 2 old jet skis in some little Podunk AR town, and a lot of fun with me and Erin buying fake stick-on moustaches out of a vending machine and wearing them in a catfish restaurant.  They say that a son will often marry someone like his mother.  Erin {my son's fiance} has the same weird sense of humor as I do, so I am afraid that there will be many more trips with lots of shenanigans in store in the future!