As noted in my latest blog entry, Zan and I were both pretty disappointed that we couldn’t take a second trip down the alpine slide together … but he recovered nicely by opting to instead get hooked up to some bungee cords and launch himself skyward by bouncing up and down on a trampoline.
The shit these kids get to do nowadays. Hell, when I was a kid, the closest we came to something like this was jumping off the roof with an umbrella.
One of the books Jayna frequently chooses at bedtime is “How Do Dinosaurs Eat Their Food?,” in which a two-page layout of a grumpy-looking brontosaurus is accompanied by the question, “Does a dinosaur GLARE?” … and each time I read that question, Jayna demonstrates for me her ability to glare … which, clearly, she has perfected.
And I know some of you are looking at me with this same expression right now, and you’re saying, “Dude, where the hell is Part III of that White Mountains mini-vacation story you were telling us?”
It’s coming … tomorrow. Sorry; my blogging time the past few days has been dedicated to upgrading my publishing system to the latest version of WordPress, and if the folks at WordPress are listening: OK, I’m all set with updates for a looooooong time, guys! Let’s stick with this version for a while, shall we??
OK, so maybe it ain’t this, but it was more than enough to keep the kiddos happy during our recent day trip to Story Land.
Granted, the inside was a bit rundown, and Cinderella looked like the wicked stepsisters had forced her to do a few too many chores, but still …
Travel tip for all you parents out there: If you’d like to take your kids on a nature hike to see a spectacular waterfall in the mountains, don’t do it less than 24 hours after taking them to an enormous amusement park, because if you do, your kids will tell nature to go suck it.
Yes, the morning after we went to Story Land, the weather again was beautiful, and seeing as how we were in the White Mountains and all, we decided we should take in some of the natural splendor of the region … so we checked out of the hotel — oh, wait: the hotel! Lemme back up and tell you about that for a minute, because it, too, contributed significantly to the children’s general ennui about the amazing site to which we dragged them on Monday.
So, after we left Story Land, we checked into our hotel, which was actually much nicer than what I had been expecting … and since Wonder Woman had booked it at a comparatively el cheapo rate, this was a pleasant surprise.
The kids were raring to get in the pool, but we opted to do dinner first, because we wanted to see if they really would cramp up and sink to the bottom if they swam right after eating, since that’s what our parents always told us would happen.
Their enthusiasm about getting to the pool had not diminished during the course of dinner, and when I ended up being the one holding everybody up so that I could finish my mostly full pint of beer, Wonder Woman, in a moment of parental brilliance, encouraged the children to tell me to chug it. Of course, I showed her, because I did chug it.
“Whoah!” said Zan, impressed by my display of rapid alcohol consumption. (Like any good parent, I like to show him things he can strive for as he gets older.)
“Well, that was completely inappropriate,” I said as we stood to leave, and, at that same instant, I realized that the young family at the table directly across from us had witnessed this impressive display of parenting genius. Fortunately, rather than staring at me with disdain, the father was trying to keep from bursting into a laughing fit, presumably because to do so would mean having to tell to his kids what was so funny, thereby leaving him with the choice of a.) lying, or b.) explaining binge drinking.
So, with our bellies full and our blood-alcohol content elevated, we set off to the pool, which I must say, was lovely. The sun was setting above the mountains as we moved back and forth (and back … and forth … and back and forth again) between the mushroom-fountain-equipped kiddie pool, and the family-friendly (read: 3.5 foot deep) regular pool. It was basically a conglomeration of parents who were sharing a collective moment of “Thank god we don’t have to coax the kids into the car right now and drive all the way home,” which made for a rather festive atmosphere.
Of course, the biggest challenge about spending the night with the kids at a hotel is the actual “spending the night” part.
“We should probably bring the guardrails on Jayna’s bed,” Wonder Woman said to me the night before our trip.
“Yeah, definitely,” I replied.
And then we both promptly forgot all about it.
This made for an interesting night, seeing as how I spent the first three hours of it springing out of bed and pushing Jayna back to the center of her cot every time my Hyper-Sensitive Parental-Alert Hearing jerked me awake after detecting the sound of her body getting too close to the unprotected edge (or the sound of her body slamming into the wall on the other side of the cot, and if you were in the room next to us that night: Sorry!)
“But Jon,” you say, “why not just put a chair or something up against the unprotected side of the bed?”
“Because,” I reply, “when I did that at the beach house this summer, I got woken up at 3 a.m. by a child saying that they didn’t like having a chair against their bed!”
Of course, when I realized that sleeping until 3 a.m. was a better deal than performing a rescue operation every five minutes, I placed not one, but two chairs next to her bed, and we all made it to the five o’clock hour.
The kids logged some more time in the pool before we checked out, as well as some time in the hotel’s playground … all of which gives you some idea why, when we parked and walked a whole half mile into the woods, the kids mostly yawned when we finally saw this:
To be fair, they did enjoy it for a short while …
But Zan was under the impression that he was going to get to do some serious swimming, which wasn’t really an option … and Jayna slipped and fell on her ass in the water fully clothed, despite Anxiety Man’s best efforts to warn everyone to be careful on the rocks and to not get to close to the edge of the big drop-offs, because they could slip and fall and wreck themselves, and am I the only one who envisions the worst-case scenario in every situation, and then spends most of the time trying to corral everyone in order to avoid said worst-case scenario? Because, boy, do I ever get twitchy in situations where the kids could, you know, plummet to their death … something about which the fearless Wonder Woman seems to be a bit more nonchalant … so, I suppose, between the two of us, it kind of balances out (which is my way of saying, “See? It’s a good thing that I’m sporting a borderline anxiety disorder!”).
And so, after spending 15 minutes stranded in the depths of the No Fun Forest, Zan declared that it was the worst day ever, and he couldn’t believe we made him leave the pool at the hotel in order to bring him to this evil place, and Jayna concurred. So back to the car we went.
Of course, they couldn’t walk that grueling half-mile trail back to the car, because they were too tired and their legs hurt and waaaaaaaaaaahhhhhfuckinwahhhhhhh! (Sorry; I get it out of my system here so I can tolerate it when I’m with them.) So, Jayna rode my shoulders most of the way back …
… while Zan kept asking Mommy to pick up his 75-pound ass and carry him, which wasn’t an option that Mommy was particularly interested in entertaining.
We eventually switched kids, and Zan rode piggy-back style the rest of the way, and I got a nice leg workout while pretending I was back in the army and he was my fully-loaded rucksack.
Finally, thank mercy, we emerged from the depths of the boring, awful, not-a-pool-or-amusement-park-in-sight forest and loaded into the Scratchesmobile. And now we were faced with a decision: Do we bid New Hampshire adieu and head home, or do we try to salvage the day by seeking out the kind of sensory-overloading fun for which the kids were so yearning?
Well, I had the day off, and it was barely noon, and sweet mother, was it ever beautiful out, so I made a command decision to head not south, but north! Because sometimes? Sometimes, I’m just nutty like that. A total wild man. Stand back, y’all; Mr. Spontaneity coming through. (Carefully, though. Be careful. Don’t get too close to the edge; it’s slippery, and you could fall and hurt yourself.)
Much to our delight, the decision to throw caution to the wind and venture further into the mountains turned out to be the right one … because, man, did we end up showing the kids a good time.
To be continued …
[I swear, I only planned on recapping this whole trip in a single entry ... and I was sure that two entries would be more than enough ... but when I cracked 1,300 words on this one, and my eyes started to glaze over, and the very real threat of the incredibly cool tale that follows getting short shrift presented itself, I decided to go with another trilogy ... but I swear, this won't turn into a quadruplology like that whole "My Summer Vacation" saga did.]
Well, that’s it. Summer’s pretty much over, and Zan’s off to college, and I can’t write much more about it right now, because I have to get back to filling out the form for my AARP membership.
How did this all happen so fast??
He started first grade today. First. Grade. My son. The kid who I couldn’t believe just started kindergarten a few weeks ago, and — What’s that? That was a year ago??
Clearly someone’s been slipping roofies into my iced tea. That’s the only plausible explanation for these massive and sudden leaps forward in my personal timeline. Whichever one of you is responsible for drugging me: Please stop.
There’s not much to say. The kid did great. He was only there for a few hours today, and that’ll remain the same for tomorrow and Friday. After that, he’s in school until 2:45 p.m. four days a week, and for half a day on Wednesdays, and it should be pretty interesting to see how he adapts to the huge increase of time spent in a classroom every day … and by “it should be pretty interesting,” I mean “it should make for some spectacular late-afternoon meltdowns.”
He has come so far so fast, and I really couldn’t be more proud of him. I hope first grade turns out to be a great experience for him. I know his mother and I will do everything we can to help make it so.
Comin’ down the mountain
After inadvertently helping my kids to determine that nature sucks, I, in the hopes of not ending our mini-vacation on a sour note, pointed the car north, and, a short while later, arrived at Attitash ski resort — which, during the off-season, it turns out, is converted into a summer playground.
The main attraction? An alpine slide that, according to the resort’s website, is the longest in all of North America.
Now, not only had Zan and Jayna never been on an alpine slide; I’d never been on one, either. (Wonder Woman claims to have gone on one as a child, but it was in Pennsylvania somewhere, so it was probably about as exhilarating as riding a Big Wheel down a gently sloping driveway.) We watched some of the riders come down the chutes, and asked the kids if they wanted to give it a whirl. They agreed, as long as they each got to share an alpine-slide thingamajig with one of us.
Once we were all in agreement, team Scratches approached the ticket counter and asked for two tickets.
“He might be too big to ride with you,” the man behind the counter said while pointing to Zan. “Have him stand up against that ruler behind you.”
Zan placed his back against the pole on which the ruler was painted, and the top of his head was a little bit above the 48-inch mark.
“Anyone over 48 inches has to ride alone,” ticket man said.
As the quintessential 98-pound (or less) weakling growing up, I never once experienced a situation in which I was actually too big to go on a ride with a grown-up. Yet, despite the fact that I sired him, and that he just celebrated his sixth birthday less than three months ago, Zan is already big enough to play point guard for the Celtics.
After breaking the bad news to us, ticket man tried to help convince Zan that he would be just fine riding alone, but Zan wasn’t buying that rap. Hats off to the Attitash folks, though, because it turned out that behind us was an alpine-slide demo, which consisted of a small section of the chute and a slide-thingamajig resting therein. Ticket man showed Zan how the thingamajig worked, and this seemed to convince him, so we bought three tickets and headed over to the ski lift.
We boarded one of the large chairs, and as we made our way up the mountain, one of my other alter egos — Anxiety Man — became hyper-aware of the absence of a seatbelt or similar device by the fastening of which my young children might have been made more secure, so I kept a firm grip on the two of them in order to help eliminate the already unlikely threat of them accidentally hurling themselves off the lift and plummeting to the ground. Yes, this is the shit that goes through my head.
Other than having to deal with my ever-present neurosis, the ride up the mountainside was grand. The weather was absolutely picture perfect, and I’m still trying to figure out who I’m going to have to blow in my next life for bestowing upon us two absolutely gorgeous days during our little escape.
Now, the kids have gone skiing … but that was at a very tiny mountain … and they didn’t ride the lift; they just went up a little magic-carpet thing and glided down a very modest hill. With that in mind, our view from the top of Attitash (which was spectacular) must have seemed to them roughly the same as the view out of an airplane window.
As we approached the line leading to the chutes, I watched a couple of people begin their descent, and saw the attendant hold back the next riders until the recently departed ones were completely out of view … and it was at that point that something became very clear to me: in the highly unlikely event that we were able to convince Zan to actually board the thingamajig and set off on his own, the best possible outcome we could have hoped for would be for either Wonder Woman, me or one of the Attitash staff to collect his frightened, tearful, psychotherapy-needing ass from the chute a short way down the mountain.
“Zan, do you want to ride down alone, or with me?” I asked.
“With you,” he answered without hesitation. Duh.
The young, slacker-ish-looking attendant seated at the take-off line didn’t seem like the type who’d whip out a tape measure and enforce the whole 48-inches thing, so I placed my thingamajig at the top of the chute, climbed aboard, and told Zan to climb in with me. Wonder Woman and Jayna went ahead of us, and once they were out of sight, Zan and I set off down the mountain.
The ride down was a total blast, and confirmed for me that to send Zan down on his own would have been to initiate a mountain rescue that likely would have ended up involving a helicopter and a cable-lowered stretcher.
They don’t allow any cameras on the alpine slide, so, sadly, I have no photographs of our spectacular view from atop, or trip down, the mountain, so you’ll have to settle for this reenactment:
When we reached the bottom, Wonder Woman and Jayna were waiting.
“We were starting to get worried,” WW said. “We’ve been down here for a while.”
OK, so maybe I had erred on the side of caution during my first-ever alpine-slide experience, but the more relevant factor was Wonder Woman’s brazen disregard for proper alpine-slide safety regulations.
“Did you guys go over the jump?” she bragged.
“‘The jump’?” I said. “What jump?”
“That one part where the track goes over a bump and gets really steep all of a sudden,” she answered.
“You mean the part where all those ‘SLOW DOWN’ signs were posted?”
“I must not have seen those.”
“Yeah, they were pretty hard to miss … especially that 12-foot-wide, three-foot-tall, fluorescent, day-glo-orange banner.”
Wonder Woman’s daredevilish behavior notwithstanding, our alpine-slide initiation went well … so much so that the kids wanted to do it again. Unfortunately, this time around, the lift operator at the bottom of the mountain insisted that Zan would have to go down on his own, to which Zan responded with a hearty “No fucking way” (or something like that).
Jayna asked if I would take her instead, which I gladly agreed to do, but before she and I got on the lift, I really wanted to help Zan feel less disappointed, so I asked my ever-so-cautious son if he would want to instead try the nearby psychotic-looking bungy-trampoline thing. Now, get a load of this:
The kid totally went for it. What a cool dude.
So that was how we capped off our White Mountain excursion: with oodles of high-altitude fun. We’re planning to do it again next year. Perhaps Zan will be up to the challenge of solo alpine sliding by then. We shall see.
P.S.: Jayna said Daddy went down the alpine slide way faster than Mommy … so there.