Chapter Four: Going West
Well, we’ve
got us a cook, and the canoe is tied down tight and the tire pressure is
checked and the oil is okay and we’re heading west. Of course, it took awhile to check the tire
pressure, especially after the can of flat tire repair I used on the car tires
exploded in my face, covering my eyes with glue and scaring the heck out of me,
but it rinsed out without my going blind.
Goodbye to the east, nice as you are, because the real vacation is
starting. We’re at that
One forgotten moment: On Syracuse. I neglected to mention that last thing that happened there. Apparently the town has very high water pressure. After using the lavatory at Wall Mart, I made the mistake of looking back. The automatic flush caught me right in the eye.
Okay, those are the shirts we bought for the Hawaiian party.
Of course,
we never went to the Hawaiian Party. But
let me start at the beginning. On
Saturday, we closed up the shop the way we usually do, by covering the tables
with plastic tablecloths and running the plastic across a line of chairs that
block the entrance. Thinking perhaps
that she is Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (that hot one on TV, 
played by Irish McCalla, not that lame movie
where you can see under Tanya Roberts’ skirt when she’s riding the zebra),
Diane decided to leap over the plastic and fell, 
,
effectively twisting her ankle so that it ballooned up about six times its
original size and stayed that way, so far for three days.
We drove
past the Hawaiian party and it consisted primarily of little children jumping
around the dance floor and one large nerd wearing a hula skirt over his
jeans. We had, however, been told of a
Karaoke party the cat show was putting on, so we headed for the bar. Diane dragged herself in, leaning on me like
a trouper, only to find that nobody from the cat show would offer her a
seat. I don’t know why I didn’t remember this snooty treatment and not bother
to come at all. We’ve been to a number
of cat club parties and have always been treated the same way. “Sorry, all the seats are taken.” In this case, it was even worse, one of the
organizers of the show who was headed for the bar went out of her way to say to
Diane, who was standing there in pain, on her swollen foot, that we shouldn’t
use her seat because she would be right back.
Finally a pair of rednecks at the bar who weren’t part of the cat club
offered their seats to us, but before we could sit down, the bar tender said
Freddy and
The next day, the man who had organized the party came to Diane and apologized, not for their poor manners, but only that the bartender had thrown us out! Typical. We will never attend one of those stupid cat club parties again!
Of course,
you never can trust me to remember how bad things were when I saw “never
again.” I once said, “Never again,” when
it came to taking Interstate 90 past
They weren’t.
For those of you have never been in the area, I’ll explain. If you have, you know all about it and you might as well skip the next paragraph.
When I finally got into the correct lane, which meant moving right one lane because the lane I was in was completely stopped by cars pulling out of the exact change lanes and forcing their way into the lane to their right, a woman came from behind me and forced her way to my right. I was forced to let her in or scratch up my new camper. She obviously didn’t care if she damaged her own vehicle. Naturally, I had some choice words to say in the direction of her open window. When I finally paid the toll, the woman in the toll booth said, “The lady in the car in front of you said she was sorry.” Right. There are other words I can think off that describe her better as a female of her species.
Driving a few miles took hours!
We spent
the night at a Wal-mart we remembered in
What is it
with Walmarts this trip? Suddenly we
can’t depend on them anymore. We have a
list of those walmarts which don’t allow parking which we downloaded before we
left home, but suddenly it’s worthless.
Just as in
This sign said, “No overnight parking. Unauthorized vehicles will be towed away.” Others have said, “No overnight RV or Truck parking.” I assumed the sign here at Berloit was directed at cars, and went to bed exhausted.
I woke in up terror. They’re towing my camper away. Suddenly it was rolling down the road like Robin Williams’ camper in RV, and I had jumped out of bed and was trying to hold onto it with a rope I had used to block the parking space in front of me so no cars would prevent us from pulling out. Freddy had a rope, too. And Jason. Jason? What the hell was Jason doing here? Why were we holding onto the camper with a rope?
Wake up, Bill. This is a nightmare.
Great. A stupid nightmare, when I’m so exhausted
after that miserable traffic in
It took awhile before sleep came again . . .
“You can’t tow my camper away!”
“You are parked illegally,” the female officer said.
“Okay, I’ll move.”
“We are towing this vehicle.”
I was desperate. “Okay, I’ll pay the fine.”
“It isn’t a question of a fine. Think of the poor people who want to go to walmart who can’t because you are blocking their way. This camper will be impounded for six months.”
“What about our animals? My family?”
“You should
have thought about that before you parked here.
Don’t you people from
“What?” That was what the ranger had said that time we had parked outside the Lincoln Memorial on New Years’ Day. This is crazy. This is another nightmare.
Needless to say, I got no rest at all that evening. When dawn broke, I walked the dogs and cleaned the bird crap off the camper windows and had breakfast. We were on the road about 7:00 am. There would be no rest for me until we got out of that place.
I worried
so about where we would sleep Tuesday night, that I had Diane make a
reservation at a Passport America campground in the
We had
arrived early enough to drive downtown and see the famous
They were kind enough to lend Diane a wheelchair so she could come in and shop for souvenirs and corn stuff: corn candles, corn cob strippers, corn salt and pepper shakers, corn palace official popcorn, corn candy of all kinds, everything related to corn except ethanol was for sale there, and we could get ethanol at the gas station down the road.
We arrived at The Badlands Wednesday afternoon. Freddy had a great time driving the car through the park as we saw some of the beautiful sights.
There was one disappointment that day. We stopped at a gift shop and prairie dog farm. I figured Crystal, who so loved feeding ducks wherever we stopped, would have a great time feeding the prairie dogs, so while Freddy helped his mother get out of the camper with her crutches, I bought Crystal two bags of prairie dog feed—unsalted peanuts—and a little prairie dog pin for her tee shirt which I said would make the prairie dogs run up to her for food.
No such
luck. These prairie had apparently been
stuffed full of peanuts by the tourists and often let food bounce off their fat
bodies rather than bend over to eat one.
They looked like Cartman the time he spent weeks on the computer in the “World
of Combat” episode of
Of course, we went to Wall Drug, the fabulous “South of the Border of the West,” where you could buy just about anything, including a stuffed deer ass for $99.99.
My old
leather hat, that I had gotten in Mitchell the first time we visited
We had a
lot of fun with that chair, by the way.
Freddy pretended to roll her downstairs like Richard Widmark did in that
old noir film, and
On the way back to the campground, we stopped for late pictures in the rich colors of the setting sun. Freddy took a wonderful picture featuring me and my new hat:
Doesn’t it look something like an Indiana Jones movie? I think I’ll have it enlarged for the wall.
And just so
I don’t make this chapter overly long, like I did the last one, I’m going to
put an end to it, as the sun comes up here in the tiny town of