Where To Go On Winter Break?

This is the second year now that Bossier Parish has given our kids an extra week off after Christmas. A fantastic idea, in my opinion. Gives families a chance to travel after all the Christmas rush or even just sit around and play with all our new toys. It has given me a wonderful chance to have an extra week to perfect my skills as the drummer to my son’s guitar playing on his new Rock Band game. I am now ready to accept the invitation that is most certainly coming from Van Halen for me to join the band.

However, now that we have the opportunity to travel the week after the holidays, we have to figure out where we want to go. The problem is all the logistics to winter travel.

Air travel the last few times has been notoriously problematic. Last year we decided to go visit the in-laws in Florida. Visiting the in-laws is always a nice thing to do when the other option is, for instance, sitting at home and ripping out your fingernails with plyers. But in this case, my in-laws live near Disney World, so it won the toss up between the Florida visit and the plyers.

Since we booked late, our only flying options were out of Dallas. We all piled in our car and drove the three hours to compress ourselves like sardines in a very small plane filled with very large people. I was so tightly pressed to my neighbor that my assortment of religious jewelry left dents on my neck. One always needs religious jewelry when harboring an extreme fear of flying that has developed in recent years. I think resulting from as I’ve aged, I have gotten heavier. And everyone knows that heavy things don’t fly very well. They tend to fall down very fast and splat. So I enlist all the help I can get.

It also doesn’t help very much when the planes have those little TVs in front of you that show you where the plane is, how high it is, and how fast it is flying. Those are facts I prefer not to know.

And while I am being squeezed between my daughter and a stranger, my son is a few rows up from me is next to an older woman who seemed to like him very much. Of course to the delight of younger brother who teased incessantly for the entire trip that his teenage brother had been hit on by an old lady. My numerous references to Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore did nothing to alleviate the punches that were being thrown between the two loving brothers.

We actually had a nice time. I saw Mickey and we toured Dinosaur World. After a few days fun and relaxation we all boarded the plane in the sunny Florida winter sun to head home. Only to find ourselves grounded in North Carolina due to inclement weather somewhere else. While we were grounded, our bags weren’t. They went ahead without us while we got to stay in a hurriedly found hotel with no clothes, makeup, or anything we owned.

Luckily the desk clerk gave us all tiny toothbrushes and tiny deodorants so we would have shiny teeth and not stink for our return journey. And my daughter was sure he was the singer, Usher, on leave from his world tour, while he moonlighted as a desk clerk at the Econolodge over the holidays. We all asked for his autograph, which he was happy to give us along with the tiny toothbrushes.

We finally made it back to Dallas where my husband stuffed his ears to prevent from listening to my constant grumbling that we could have driven back and forth in half the time it had taken us to fly, and I would not have worried about free falling out of the sky. But once my three wonderful children were back in the familiar environment of their own car, they spent the next 200 miles calling each other names, punching each other over Ashton Kutcher references, and hollering that we had to stop for the bathroom 78 times.

My husband looked at me and said "So you wanted to drive in 15 hours of this?"

Oh well, this year I’ll just stay at home and wait for the call from Van Halen.