My Family Vacation
The morning of Monday, 23 June, after loading our luggage into the trunk of our first rental car, my wife Katrina comfortably seated herself in the passenger seat and our children, Christopher (age 6) and Adrienne (age 5), buckled themselves into the backseat, toys and crayons and construction paper at the ready, the Chance family sallied forth. Knowing that traffic on I-10 West in the morning would be a bit of a bear, I cut through the suburbs around our yellow stucco home, adding several miles to the initial leg of the trip but still managing to shave several minutes of drive time.
The voyage along I-10 heading up into the Texas Hill Country was uneventful. We made one pit stop for the usual reasons, purchased bottles of
Yoo-hoo and crunchy snack items, and soon found ourselves navigating the ridiculously engineered freeway system of San Antonio.
San Antonio is a beautiful city rich with history. Its freeways were designed by madmen. Following I-10 through San Antonio requires a lightning quick wit and cat-like reflexes, roaring back and forth across many lanes of uncooperative traffic in order to catch the next maze-like exit that continues the One True Path leading to our destination. Thankfully, I am gifted with an extraordinary sense of direction as well as an uncanny talent for high-pressure vehicular navigation. (My life served as the basis for
The Fast and the Furious, although, I must confess, Vin Diesel is a little wimpy to accurately portray me.)
Due to my keen planning, we arrived in Boerne, Texas, right around lunchtime. I found the Holiday Inn Express right away, and soon had all of us checked in and our luggage carried to our room. In obligatory homage to the Spirit of Technology, we were not give room keys, but instead received two plastic cards with a magnetic strip on one side and a bold, dark-blue arrow on the other. Somehow, my precognitive powers failed me. I should have seen that these sci-fi lock picks were a doom-filled foreshadowing of Recurring Problems.
After a light lunch at the local Chili's (I made the mistake of ordering the Philly Cheesesteak, apparently lulled into a false sense of security by some sort of side effect from that clever Jack-in-the-Box commercial), we glommed a dozen or so brochures for touristy attractions and retired to our room. The children decided to take turns antagonizing each other. I placated them for a time with
Dexter's Laboratory and
The Justice League. Around dinner time, I discovered that the battery of our rental car had gone completely dead. Thinking and acting quickly, I called the Avis road-side service number. Two or so hours later, a tow truck driver arrived with our second rental car.
Without a vehicle, we availed ourselves of the local pizza delivery services and supped on wedges of saucy bread with pepperoni and Dr. Pepper. Our plans to go swimming were derailed by the regularly schedule pool cleaning services, which turned out to be just fine since the children were quite tired and fell asleep around 7 p.m.
Once Christopher and Adrienne had nodded off, I laid all of the brochures in an arc before me. While thinking pure thoughts, I studied the color pictures and eye-catching fonts for a few minutes (metagame: I took 20 on my Profession (family vacation planner) check). I took my winnowing fork to the brochures, separating the wheat from the chaff, and soon had our next day's activities planned.
Despite not making any guard duty arrangements, the night passed uneventfully. We broke fast continentally, returned briefly to the room to brush our teeth, and then charged out into the hot morning sun to take our designated places in our second rental car. Having carefully studied maps of the area, I sallied forth. Interstate turned into state turned into barely improved county road, and without much fuss or muss we arrived at
Cascade Caverns.
Carefully avoiding the steely beaks of the free-range peacocks, we purchased our admission tickets, and then perused the chintzy merchandise available to suckers in the gift shop. My daughter asked about a million questions, most of them involving whether or not I would buy her "this" or "how about this" or "ooh!, look at this!" My son, more sedate, contented himself with self-inflicted rubber snake bites and pretending to die while protecting hobbits. Apparently the snake was in league with Saruman.
Our tour guide, Becky, was way too perky, but had the tour guide patter down to an art. Cascade Caverns was a nice tour, but disappointingly brief. On the plus side, it was not an over-developed tourist cave. No snack bar, no pesky safety features like sturdy cat-walks, et cetera. There were also a few places through which I had to walk bent over nearly double, imagining what an enormous ass-pain it would be to fight off a horde of goblins in such cramped quarters.
Leaving Cascade Caverns behind, we went north a few miles to the
Cave without a Name. Our tour guide, an old guy named Melvin with very pointy knees, was obviously well-schooled on the history of the cave and the various names of its different formations. The Cave without a Name, like Cascade Caverns, is a living cavern with only minimal development to make it comfortable for tourists. The Cave without a Name is also larger, consisting of about four main caverns. It had some truly striking formations.
As with all cavern tours, our guide shut the lights off so that we could all experience the joys of total darkness. Fortunately, he flicked the lights back on before the
mole people detected our disadvantageous position. Since my daughter has neither fear (except for one) nor couth, on our way out of the cavern Adrienne asked Melvin if he would turn the lights out again. According to Melvin, Adrienne is only the second person to ever ask to have the lights turned out again. By the end of the tour, Melvin was sorry he gave us lookie-loos permission to ask whatever questions we wanted to. I don't think Adrienne stopped asking questions for more than 30 seconds throughout the entire tour. Christopher, on the other hand, became our group's official safety monitor, going out of his way to make sure no one violated any of the Rules of the Tour or failed to note that
that step is slippery.
On the way back to the hotel, we stopped in for lunch at what is probably Boerne's only Italian restaraunt (or, as we say down here in Texas, eye-talian). The food was good, although the portions of my manicotti were a bit on the small side. I was also constantly distracted by our waitress's necklace of blotchy purple hickeys and squeaky, Minnie Mouse voice. For dessert, we hopped next door to Baskin Robbins to partake in a few of the 31 flavors.
Adrienne got confused after her one-scoop sundae was made and decided she didn't really want a sundae. The ice cream man fobbed the sundae off on my wife, who pouted as she ate the sweet treat, not because she doesn't like ice cream, but because (once again) her dreams of getting a yogurt smoothie were thwarted. Adrienne, in turn, got a single, plain scoop strawberry ice cream. Of course, she later decided sundaes were good and demanded bites of everyone else's ice cream. Christopher, overwhelmed by all of the options, choked and opted for plain vanilla. Even the prospect of hot fudge seemed too risque, and he settled for regular chocolate syrup. I, on the other hand, not the least bit intimidated by ice cream, got a brownie sundae, one scoop of peanut-butter-and-chocolate, one scoop of pralines-and-cream, smothered in marshmallow syrup, whipped cream, crushed almonds, and a single, artistically poised cherry.
After the obligatory 45 minutes passed, I felt benevolent and accompanied the family down to the pool. My wife soaked in the non-whirling whirlpool. The children donned their life jackets. Adrienne plunged head first into the water over and over again, confident that she could not experience pain or discomfort. Christopher clung to the edge, shouting warnings to Adrienne about how deep the water was. Christopher, although he is only six, is about five feet tall and an accomplished reader. Thus, he pays careful attention to pool signs about depth, the unsuitability of diving, et cetera. I sat on a reclining poolside chair and tried to read
Pact of the Fathers by Ramsey Campbell, but was too often distracted by the white trash floating around the pool.
Watching other people's children makes me appreciate my own. My children don't cuss, don't sport the latest in trendy body piercings (Look! We're rebelling! We're individuals!), and I'll be dead before you see my daughter at the age of 13 running around in a micro-bikini. Of course, Mom, Dad, and Granma were too busy swilling Miller Light to monitor their children. I mean: Miller Light? Blech. Talk about being like making love in a canoe.
After about an hour of water-related frolicking, I hauled the family up to our hotel room. We changed clothes, and once again sallied forth into Boerne, this time to get some German food at a nearby restaraunt, the Boerne Vistro. Rather than Hickey-Necklace-Girl, we were waited on by Snooty-Man. I guess working in Boerne's only fine cuisine restaraunt is reason for snootiness. I had the schnitzel, the wife got a German sampler platter (brautwurst, jagerschnitzel, "homemade" mustard), and the children got pasta. Pasta. At a restaraunt serving German food. Some people's kids. To help purge the memory of the Miller Light from my mind, I quaffed a
Guinness.
My wife, more health conscious than me, opted to drink water. This must have offended Snooty-Man, because despite my wife's best efforts to get his attention for a refill, Snooty-Man studiously pretended to not have seen Katrina's raised hands and eyebrows. No longer able to tolerate Snooty-Man's misbehavior, I raised a manly hand. Snooty-Man very promptly rushed to my side and obsequiously refilled my wife's glass with fresh water and also brought us to-go boxes for our leftovers. Snooty-Man instinctively knew better than to provoke my wrath. After dinner it was time to watch a bit of television while the children fell asleep.
At home, we do not have cable. I can't see paying money to watch a TV I've already paid for. Consequently, I have never watched
Samurai Jack. Tuesday evening, I tried to watch this cartoon, not so much because I found it entertaining, but rather because it shares the hypnotic quality possessed by roadkill and traffic accidents. You don't want to look; you
have to look. This annoyed my wife to no end. She enjoys a sort of moral superiority to me in that she is not compelled to look at roadkill or traffic accidents, nor has she become desensitized to violence by watching too many Ahnold movies. Thus, whenever she turned away from the TV, I quickly hit the "previous channel" button and stared in slack-jawed amazement at
Samurai Jack, only to be snapped out it by Katrina's shrill growls once she discovered my perfidy.
Wednesday morning arrived. We broke fast continentally again. Christopher, acting against character, tried something new: boiled egg and Philadelphia cream cheese. Together. At the same time. He smeared cream cheese on a boiled egg and ate it. And I thought Miller Light was disgusting. My morally superior, health conscious wife, in her continuing efforts to teach the children all sorts of false things, managed to convince Adrienne that a bagel with cream cheese belongs in the same category as a hot cinnamon roll. After we had eaten, it was road trip time. Unbeknownst to the family, I was feeling adventurous.
The first leg of our outing took us to
San Marco, Texas, where we visted
Wonder World. There was an obligatory repeat of the gift shop madness experienced at Cascade Caverns. In short order, however, we were on our way for a "train" ride. It really isn't a train. It's more like a golf cart pulling three carts, but the children were duly impressed. The train took us through the waterfall and the tunnel behind it straight into Ravenous Deer Country.
Our conductor, Matt, stopped the train in the midst of the Deer What Have Not Eaten. We were besieged by starved, hoofed animals, sticking their narrow heads through the bars of the train's doors and fawning over us with doe-eyed expressions of love. The children hurled deer food at the animals. I, more serene, fed the beasts by hand and scratched a snout or two in an effort to be reassuring. My wife tried to stay as far away from all living things with more than two legs as possible. Something to do with childhood fears of being eaten by cows while in Vinton, Louisiana.
We saw a few other animals, none of them terribly exciting, with the exception of the
scare goats, living proof that Darwin was wrong. You see, a scare goat's sole defense mechanism when frightened by a deadly predator is to go rigid and fall over as if dead. Shepherds, eager to exploit this oversight in the so-called law of survival of the fittest, would lull scare goats into a false sense of security by hiding them among sheep, yet another incredibly stupid animal. The scare goats, thinking they had it made, would suddenly find themselves rigid and falling over when wolves attacked, and the sheep and shepherd would then beat a hasty retreat.
After Wild Kingdom, we went into the Wonder Cave, which is actually a grueling descent along stairs so steep they have more in common with ladders. "Safety be damned" is our motto here in Texas, home of the
rattlesnake round-up. The Wonder Cave was formed by a Jurassic earthquake along the Balcones Fault which runs across the middle of Texas. Being a dry-formed cave, there isn't really anything in the way of spectacular formations, but Matt was entertaining. The Wonder Cave sits a few dozen feet above the
Edwards Aquifer, an absolutely enormous underground freshwater sea. For obvious reasons, we didn't get to tour the Aquifer.
Our descent into the depths of the earth was followed by an elevator ride to the top of an observation tower to get a better look at the rolling Texas Hill Country. Quite nice, but I don't particularly like heights. Heights, in my experience, often precede falls which always end in bone-jarring impacts. Adrienne, the almost-fearless-one, hauled Katrina up to the very tippy-top of the observation tower, rushing from chain link fence to chain link fence, daring gravity to suck her groundward. My wife aged noticeably.
Wonder World ends with a brief walk through the "Anti-Gravity House," which is built at about a 35-degree angle with walls at a 20-degree angle, creating the impression that cue balls roll uphill and water flows contrary to gravity. It is also makes it awfully hard to walk. Christopher, sensing chaos, transformed into Spazboy and careened off of everything and everyone in sight. Briefly, the white trash children didn't seem so bad.
It being lunchtime by now, I purchased more Tourist Crap for the children to break and fight over. Oh joy. We then raced back toward the interstate.
A word about the interstates in the Hill Country. The maniacal civil engineers that designed the labrythine San Antonio freeway system obviously got work in the smaller, surrounding communities. Every single on ramp to the interstate was a sudden, 90-degree angle off of the feeder. 90-degree angle. That's a good angle when moving at 50 miles per hour.
We popped into the Lone Star Cafe for lunch. Yeeehaw! Christopher got a hamburger, nothing on it except the meat and bread, because he wouldn't want to actually combine foods (except for boiled eggs and cream cheese). Adrienne, after much pouting and snarling, decided on a grilled cheese sandwich. The wife got a turkey-avacado club, which really probably isn't as bad it sounds, especially if you got rid of the turkey. I wanted the brisket, but Lusty-Girl, our waitress, apologetically informed me that there was none to be had. So, I got the ribs, which proves design in nature since why else would animals come with handy handles?
We also got appetizers. Katrina, as usual, got the queso. I, being bolder, ordered the breaded, lightly fried
jalepenos. To my surprise, Adrienne actually ate some. Of late, she has shied away from spicy foods, despite (or because of) the fact she used to eat salsa straight from the bowl when a toddler. Those were the diapers my wife
had to change. To Adrienne's credit, she does eat sushi.
Lusty-Girl, so called because she kept hitting on me right there in front of my wife, was amusing. When talking to me (and only to me as if Katrina did not exist), she would jog her wide child-birthing hips to the side, thrust her T-shirt wrapped breasts forward, and grin vapidly. Once, much to my surprise, after I asked to have the children's drinks refilled, Lusty-Girl actually said, "Well, let's just take off our tops." My wife insists she meant the lids on the children's cups, but I, being more wordly, easily caught the tossed double entrende.
Lunch over, we hastened back to the interstate, missing the first 90-degree turn onto the highway. As previously mentioned, I was feeling adventurous, so when the exit for
Canyon Lake came along, I took it. We wound our way through the hills, moving ever closer to the lake, which is quite scenic. Of course, being adventurous, merely looking at lake was not going to quench my thirst for danger.
In short order, we were hauling our inner tubes uphill toward the stairs leading down to the bank of the chilly
Guadalupe River. Did I mention the water was chilly? Well, it was. I mean, stop your breathing and make your heart palpitate chilly. But, hey, what's a little hypothermia? Unsurprisingly, Christopher, the Nervous One, was not too thrilled about floating in a rubber tube. Adrienne, the Brave One, took to it quick enough. In short order, guided by me, seasoned river-floating-adventurer, we were bobbing peacefully along the Guadalupe River, trying not to laugh at all the college kids trying to figure out how to act in the thirteenth grade.
The Guadalupe isn't a particularly deep or wide river. Nor does it move that fast, except for a few brief rapids always over rocks just barely below the water's surface. When we hit the first of these rapid spots, two things happened. The first wasn't a surprise: Katrina managed to run her tube aground on a rock in the center of the river. This happens anytime Katrina gets near a rock while she is on an inner tube. Fortunately, we had hold of the children's tubes, so they didn't go careening down the river on their own. The second thing that happened is the children reversed roles: Adrienne became the Nervous One and Christopher the Brave One.
Contrary to assertions in
another thread, some women really do love heroic men. My wife, for example. Seeing one child in distress and my wife marooned, I went to hero mode. Hand over hand, fingers like steel digging into slimy, submerged rocks, I hauled myself upstream, laughing at the inexorable current. With my son hanging onto my foot so he wouldn't float away, I let loose a mighty shout of defiance against the forces of nature and dislodged my wife from her miniature Alcatraz. She and Adrienne caught the current and shot downstream. I then launched myself and Christopher, still clinging to my foot, into the current and followed along.
Christopher went from Brave One to Giddy One. He laughed hysterically, screamed with delight, and generally enjoyed the peril of plunging downstream at speed. Adrienne went from Nervous One to Terrified One, crying and screaming in fear. My wife caught a low-hanging branch and held herself anchored until Christopher and me caught up. We then bobbed along as a family again.
There were a couple of more rapid spots. I took Adrienne with me and did my best to allay her fears. By the time we reached the walk-out point, she had mostly calmed down, but was not eager for a repeat of our adventure. Christopher, on the other hand, was still laughing. When we returned to the tube rental place, Christopher said he wanted to go again. I thought about it, but decided we should celebrate our victory with popsicles, bottled water, and Cool Blue Gatorades.
We left the Guadalupe River behind and wound our way back to Boerne and our hotel. Dinner consisted of the collected leftovers from earlier eating-outs. Both children fell asleep rather early, and I resisted the urge to stare slack-jawed at more
Samurai Jack.
Thursday morning started uneventfully. As is our habit, we broke fast continentally. I had already packed everything except our toothbrushes and other toiletries. Muscles bulging, I took the luggage downstairs to check out. When I went to pull the second rental car up to the lobby doors, I discovered that, yes, the second rental car's battery had also gone dead. Transitioning into Outraged Confrontation Mode, I got the cell phone from Katrina and discovered that it also had gone dead. Suddenly, the two previous instances of me having to have our magnetic keys re-magnetized were seen as the dreadful foreshadowing that they had been all along.
I used the hotel's phone to once again call Avis, who promised to send out a new car to me as soon as possible. Katrina and the children returned to the room while I waited in the lobby, typing up this travelogue. Thankfully, the new car arrived in record time. We packed the trunk, packed the children, and soon were on our way back to Houston.
Our family vacation had come to an end. Fun was had by all even if the trip wasn't all fun.
BTW, the pictures of our trip are being developed. If any are worth viewing, I'll upload them to this thread.
