Granddaughter Takes ‘True Woodward Vacation

  “Why don’t you ever write any vacation disaster stories any more?”

  A question I still hear time to time from readers. When our kids were young, my wife and I seemed to experience every vacation mishap possible, many of which found their way into my columns. Readers loved them because they made their own vacations sound good by comparison. 

  We inadvertently pitched our tent on a red ant hill, blew up a camp stove.

  We had a flat tire during a blizzard on a mountain pass. While I was trying to change the tire, the jack slipped on the icy road, pinning both the jack and the tire under the car. If a friendly trucker hadn’t stopped to help, we might still be there. 

  Our generator went out on our way home from a vacation. With no generator for the headlights, we spent the night shivering at a rest stop in a VW bus, listening to sick kids cough and sneeze all night.

  During one particularly memorable vacation, I caught the chicken pox. You absolutely don’t want to get a childhood disease as an adult. It was as sick as I’ve ever been.

  As time passed and the kids grew up, however, our vacations came to resemble actual vacations more than adventures in purgatory. The catch was that they didn’t supply any column material. Nobody wants to read about someone’s routine vacation.

  Happily, my granddaughter Hailey has stepped up to fill the void.

  Her destination was the family cabin in neighboring Washington state. She’d be traveling with her significant other, Alex, four younger folks aged ten to 24, and Alex’s dog, Sasha. With that many people and a German Shepherd to squeeze in, they opted to rent a van.

  It’s a ten-hour drive to the cabin. They wanted to get an early start, but overslept. By the time they got to the airport, it was after 8 a.m. Alex waited in the car while Hailey went to get the van. At the rental counter, a surprise was waiting.

  “I’ve rented cars before and always used my debit card, but it was always when I was flying somewhere,” she said. “This time I found that if the rental isn’t connected to a flight, you have to use a credit card.”

  She’d ordered a new credit card, but it hadn’t arrived yet so she went back out to the car to get Alex’s. A good plan, except that Alex didn’t have his wallet with him.

  “He figured he’d just be dropping me off to get the van so he wouldn’t need it.”

  The “early start” was beginning to seem like a fairy tale. By the time Alex got his credit card and they came home to load the van, it was mid-morning and getting hot. Worse, the van had electric doors that wouldn’t allow them to use their car-top luggage carrier.

  “Everybody was hot and sweating and miserable,” Hailey said. “And because the carrier wouldn’t work we had to cram everything into the back of the van. We’d just finished when Alex came out of the house, opened the hatch and everything went flying out.”

  When everything was re-packed, there wasn’t room for Sasha, the aforementioned German Shepherd. It took a long time to rearrange things so that she could be marginally comfortable. By the time they got to Ontario, where they should have been by roughly 9 a.m., it was noon. 

  “We were all cranky, tired, angry and upset that we wouldn’t have an nice evening hang together. Then Ryan (her brother) suddenly said ‘Not to alarm you, but there’s a lot of ants back here.’”

  A veritable swarm of ants.

  “Hundreds and hundreds of them! They’d been living inside a half full bag of dog food that we thought would be about right for the vacation. They were everywhere. The kids were freaking out. We had to spend 45 minutes on ant patrol.”

  This should have been enough mishaps for any trip.

  It wasn’t. When they stopped for gas in central Oregon, another was waiting. 

  “We opened the doors and it was insanely windy. The wind blew chip bags, napkins, trash and other things all over the gas station parking lot. A whirlwind of debris! Alex tried to feed Sasha, and the wind was blowing the food away.”

  They’d been looking forward to enjoying some scenery, but it was wildfire season. The “scenery” consisted of smoking, smoldering hills.

  Here we will draw the curtain of mercy over these misadventures, except to say that they arrived at their destination  roughly four hours later than planned.

  “We’d been looking forward to still having some daylight and a nice evening together, but it wasn’t to be.”

  It had had all the makings, she said, of “a true Woodward vacation.” 

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. 

Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.