So the adventures begin......

The first of our road trips wasn't called an official "Howell's Hellions" road trip until a little bit later. It was a trip to see the fireworks at Miller's park, a local park right across from Darthwoo's place of work. We parked in a parking lot that was about 500 yards from the actual park. We sauntered over to the park and found a good place to sit. We laid out the 2 blankets and everyone did stuff. Darth and the Italian Stallion started to draw, Poe the Enforcer sat in the chair he brought along and listened to his scanner, while the typist and I did stuff that later concerned this very web page. Then Poe, the Italian Stallion, the typist, and I decided to toss the football around in the open space sort of far behind us. Darth did not come because he did not want to leave his drawing pad out for anyone to steal. (If memory serves me correctly, he had some very graphic, possibly porn pictures that he had pulled out from the very depths of his mind) We played around for a bit creating games, since the usual toss back and forth got a little boring. One of my favorite games was when both people of the team had to touch the ball before it was caught. It took awhile but the typist and I soon had a pattern. Poe and the Italian Stallion soon got there own act together and then the typist decided that she would go and sit down then maybe Darth would join us. It took awhile but he finally did. Then after a bit, Poe retreated to the blankets. Now Darth isn't the best football player so the distance between the thrower and the throwee decreased dramatically. For a time there was only about 15 feet between us. We then changed gears dramatically, because all of the sudden we were playing soccer with a football. It evolved into a game of keep-away, or as I prefer to say, monkey in the middle, with Darth as the monkey. This game ended about 5-10 minutes later because of the numerous times the football was stepped on. (This is not good for the football since it is a Nerf turbo with the whistle in it, which Nerf doesn't make anymore but they should, because it is a great football.) The three of us then retreated to the safety of the blankets, ready to be amazed and dazzled by the firework display.

It was getting dark and all of the sudden, the Italian Stallion's tummy started to rumble. He wanted to get a funnel cake from the food booths that were there. After a little bit of a commotion, the Italian Stallion and I headed off to join the queue of hunger-ridden people. (I always wanted to use the word "queue" in a sentence.) We were in the queue of bodies about 20 people deep and more people were standing behind us. We were there for about 10-15 minutes when rumors started circulating that the booth was out of funnel cakes. People were getting panicky, including us, that the rumors might be true. Some people gave up, we held strong. We talked ourselves out of believing them, our minds filled with visions of the deliciousness of the funnel cakes. But soon our hopes were dashed by the ear-piercing squeals of two little boys who seemed to derive satisfaction out of being the bearers of bad news. "We got the last funnel cake! We got the last funnel cake!" So help them, they were just luck that there were eyewitnesses there. If I ever see those two little boys again... But soon their squealing like little piggys ended as they headed of into the darkness of dusk. Then I had other whining to worry about. As the line of dissatisfied pre-customers trudged off in defeat, I heard the sounds of disbelief, despise and anger in the Italian Stallion's voice. and it didn't even stop when we reached the others. It continued on and on until the fireworks started. The fireworks were great. It was a clear night and just windy enough to clear away the smoke. One of my favorite things during the fireworks was listening to the little kids around us, imagining that the fireworks were hitting planes that flew above. (No planes were injured during the viewing of the fireworks.) After it was over, we grabbed our stuff and headed into the mass exodus of people, practically holding hands so we would stay together. Once we reached the van, the fun seemed to begin. Try and imagine that at least 200 2-ton killing machines all headed for 2 exits. After finally getting out of our parking space, we headed into the raging river of metal and machine. Now before I get to far into this, I'll give you the seating arrangements: Poe was in the driver seat, the Italian Stallion was in the passenger seat, then it was the typist, me, and Darth across the row of seats behind them. With the stress of getting out of the parking space tensions were high. Let me clear this up, we weren't stressed at each other but every car that cut in line or didn't let us in was chewed out properly with enough ferocity to receive an MA rating. But we laughed it off amongst ourselves and with every pissing off minute that passed, we became more and more crazy. You have to know that the air doesn't work in the van so we had every window that we could open and in the midst of this, Darth let out the loudest sounding release of anger and tension that I have ever heard. I would describe it as being totally Darth but since you don't know Darth, it was the type of sound that if you cross-bred Chewie the Wookie, an elephant, a lion and a fog horn, it would slightly rival the sound made that night by Darth the Woo. I have never seen any of move as fast as we did to close the windows. After awhile though, it started to get hot and after only moving a couple of feet the Italian Stallion and Poe rolled down their windows. Then we made our move. We saw a slight opening and took it. Now we were on what was like a tributary of the might river that was our exit out of that man-made hell. But low and behold, we did not know that there was still more excitement ahead. We seemed to be trapping a couple's car in there parking space by about 3 feet. He flashed his lights at us a couple of times but we didn't move our van an inch. It wasn't like there was anywhere to move the car too, we were practically up the car in front of us's butt. Since the loser was probably as pissed off about the traffic as we were and the fact that we weren't paying attention to him, he cowardly sent his wife out to tell us to move our vehicle. As the lady got out of her car, the Italian Stallion rolled up his window. She attempted to communicate with him but found only mocking hand movements that indicated that he couldn't hear her. She attempted to visually use hand gestures for us to move up, but received shrugs and the mouthed words "no room" in return. Weather it was from determination or stress she headed to the car in front of us and told them to move up. As our van filled with laughter, she headed back towards us doing the hand motions for rolling down a window. The Italian Stallion did and she told us how the people in front were going to move foward so that we could move forward and let them out. The car ahead of us moved maybe about 2 feet and thus we followed in toe. She looked in back and told us to move ahead just a little bit more. We did and pretty much kissed the car ahead of us's bumper and they were
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I know, I know, I stopped mid-sentence. Well, now you'll just have to come back to know how it ends. I hope that we get a new keyboard soon so that I don't freak out when I type it. The space bar is shot on this one and my parents don't believe we need a new one. I think that they may be in denial.


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Disclaimer: No one was harmed during the typing of this page. Any shicanery (I know, spelling isn't my strong point) that happened on this adventure was purely out of fun and everyone I know gotta laugh and looks back on it with fond memories. (Yeah, that sounds sappy to me too. I have to fix it when as soon as I get some caffeine in my system.) Oh, and the ideas expressed here may not be those of Geocities and it supporters and their sponsors and the workers and the workers' mommies and.... I think I've rattled on long enough. Do you think I've got my ass-ets covered? Ohhhhhh that was terrible, ME need sugar.