Road Trip

When my grandson, Orion,  was 4 years old, we took him to visit the places where I, his mom and his great grandma originated. On the trip we visited Storybook Land, an awesome park in Aberdeen, South Dakota that is filled with architectural designs based on places and characters from storybooks and movies. Besides a really awesome tribute to Wizard of Oz, you can also see Jack jumping over the candlestick, Rapunzel’s Castle where she’s throwing down her golden hair for the prince to climb and the Pumpkin from “Peter the Pumpkin Eater” nursery rhyme. The latter was designed and built by the Industrial Arts Club of Northern State University where my father was an instructor and head of the club. It was a miserably hot August day, 96 degrees in the shade and humidity just about that.  We told Orion that he could go swimming when we got back to the hotel. Great grandma opted to stay in the room while the rest of us headed down to the pool. We were kind of looking forward to a nice cool dip but when we opened the door into the pool area that thought was quickly disabused. We were assaulted by a blast of heat, dripping humidity, a dull roar of voices and the pungent sour odor of urine. Yuck! So how about a nice cool bath instead? We took one very disappointed little boy back to the room for, as promised, a nice cool bath – well, actually it was warm because, you know, who really wants to take a cold bath in an air-conditioned hotel room? So the next day we hit the road again, stopping to visit a few relatives along the way and making a quick stop when my daughter started freaking out over a cow and bull doing what cows and bulls do. Seriously (smh)?  Had she really never seen two animals procreating before? The next stop was an old cemetery out in the middle of nowhere. Some of our old relatives were buried there – the great greats and such. We got out to have a look around and stretch our legs. As we were heading back to the car my daughter asked me to distract Orion, being the sensitive little soul that he was, while she removed the dead bird attached to the car grill. Thinking we were pretty smooth pulling that off, we climbed into the car and as I was backing up to head back to the road, little, sensitive Orion says, “The bird was like tweet, tweet, splat!” His hands splayed wide to illustrate. So much for our sensitive little soul!

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