Under the Wire

Regular “Under The Wire” readers will have noticed several of my recent columns have mentioned vacations. That is not because Sue and I have been going on so many. In fact, just the opposite is true. We hardly ever find time to travel for fun. Since we seem to be surrounded by folks who do, we have been working on a way we just might be able to pull one off.

So far, as close as we have come was a trip to Sue’s hometown of Riverton, Kan., where I got lost on my way to a convenience store and wound up just outside of Tulsa, Okla., and another drive, this time pulling a large flatbed trailer to retrieve her late father’s pickup, again in Riverton, I guess Sue figured if we keep going to the same place every time, eventually I won’t keep getting lost.

Her idea might be working. This time I didn’t get lost, but she did. Of course, it was because of me, several times.

Here is where today’s title, “Our Dumb Vacation” comes in. “Dumb” seemed to dominate most of our experiences.

The first Dumb thing to happen was me thinking our ranch pickup pulling about 5,000 pounds of 24 foot gooseneck flatbed would be able to participate in the cross country road race commonly referred to as “the Interstate Highway.” Dumb. This did give us a chance to visit lots of gas stations, 7.8 miles per gallon, results in lots of stops. Every 30 minutes or so we got to pull into a station marked by big “gas for sale” signs, only to pull up in front of a pump that didn’t work. Sometimes we found two at the same station that didn’t work. Didn’t the signs say “gas for sale?” Guess they didn’t say if they ever sold any. Dumb.

Finally arriving at our destination, loaded up our treasured 1983 Toyota pickup and set out for home. Made it about 20 feet when I got a bit off the graveled driveway onto the grass, very green due to the excessive rainfall recently, and became hopelessly stuck. Dumb.

Sue’s brother-in-law, no doubt looking forward to us leaving, pulled us out and we set off on our next big adventure. This one would start with a broken tie down chain and the need for a new chain boomer. Easter Sunday morning and we need a hardware store. Dumb.

We finally got directions to one about 30 miles out of our way.

Racing into the store, OK, so I don’t “race” anywhere anymore, I encountered a store employee in a hardware store, who had no idea what a chain boomer was but invited me to walk the entire store and look for one, Mega — dumb. Before returning to whatever hole he had crawled out from, he gave me directions to a big box store another 30 miles out of our way that might have one. Big Dumb developing here.

Assuring my wife/navigator Sue we needed to make this detour which ended up being more like 40 miles out of our way, I returned from the store with two chain boomers, you never can be too careful, to be greeted by head navigator who informed me she had no idea where we were or how to find any road leading us back to our planned route. I own this Dumb. Not her fault.

We then spent the next 10 hours or so, driving through towns we had never heard of, on everything from residential streets, main streets and field roads, hoping for a road sign indicating Colorado might be on the other end.

Yep. Vacations are Dumb. At least when I have anything to do with them.