ORIGINALLY WRITTEN DAVID VOGEL
Are we there yet?” the voice from the back seat calls.
“The more you ask, the longer it’ll be,” comes the answer from the front seat.
Little kids and long car trips never mix well. I can remember saying, “Are we there yet,” but I’ve matured it to, “So, how much longer is it until we get to Colorado?”
As the Free Press comes out, and while you’re reading this, I’ll be in Colorado. That’s right-good ol’ Colorado.
Actually, Colorado hasn’t exactly been nice to my younger brother. Every time we go to Colorado Springs, Nathan gets stung by a wasp, and if he doesn’t do that, he pricks himself on small cacti while we’re hiking in the mountains.
But none of that is nearly as bad as the time we went to Dillon, Colo. There was an indoor pool where we were staying, so naturally we spent a lot of time in the water.
When my brother swims, he sometimes brings a lot more water into his body than he should.
As it would turn out, the water in the pool had a little more chlorine than it should have-or a little more of something else than it should have-and Nathan got sick.
I won’t go into details, but Nathan got so sick we ended up at the Children’s Hospital in Denver. Thankfully, we didn’t have to stay for night, so we were able to go to Dillon Lake, and watch the Fourth of July fireworks display.
While I’m on the subject of vacation, here are some unwritten rules for hotels:
-Towels are either bought stiff or made especially for hotels to be stiff.
-Advertise the necessities like refrigerators on the Internet and then run out of money to actually buy them.
-The pool is only empty until you get in it. (I know that’s kind of a “duh” statement, but you know what I mean.)
– When you want to go up the elevator, it’s already on the top floor, and when you want to go down the elevator, it’s already on the bottom floor.
-When it says “Kids eat free” it’s not worth it. At the hotel’s restaurant, there was a deal that said that kids ate free, so I ordered from the kid’s menu. I got a pepperoni pizza-there were four slices, and each slice was 2 inches by 2 inches.
– Cable TV never has the stations you want: i.e., no “M*A*S*H*.”
– A lot of times hotels fold the end of the toilet paper into little points, but it’s not like I need to know where to sit down,
Don’t ask why.
