Our Summer Vacation, Part I: Upholstered Roadkill

6/3/11

Over the winter Catherine and I were talking about the upcoming year, making decisions about travel and schedule.  We decided to keep things simple (unusual for us) this summer and not fly back to Michigan.  So, of course, a few weeks later, Catherine booked us at a great place in Montana in June.

I got all huffy and lathered up and gave a speech about Colorado, the amazing place we are fortunate to call home and my diver deep desire to share her beauty with my boys.  I may have also crossly muttered something about not understanding why we should drop two grand on airfare to Montana when we have the bounty of the Colorado Rocky Mountains less than a day’s journey away.  So, my lovely wife, took a deep breath, gave me a look of death (she was rightly annoyed after I had given a half-hearted green light to the initial Montana idea) and graciously agreed researched other vacation options in the Centennial State.  She called the timeshare exchange operator and located an available week at a condominium at the Purgatory Mountain Resort, near Durango, the first week of June.  Thanks honey! A road trip to Durango was just the ticket.  I’m excited. She was excited, too.  

Months later, vacation day loomed.  Almost unexpectedly, our vacation started tomorrow and we were clamoring to put a bow on work tasks, pack up the troops, and hit the tarmac for our seven-hour ramble to Durango.  We, in this instance, is Catherine (an ageless beauty), Kelly (4), Rhys (weeks from his 3^rd birthday), Beckett (22 months), Anna, our Colombian au pair, little old me, and my big new mountain bike (3 mos.).  Our gang and compliment of gear for a week long vacation in the mountains would not fit in one vehicle, not even our cavernous Honda Odyssey.  Plus, we were meeting Catherine’s father, Joe, and his girl friend, Taylor, Catherine's brother, Jeff and his girl friend, Rachel, in Durango - two cars then.  Kelly, his "Pillow Pet", named Crash, my bike, and I drove point, while Catherine followed with boys number two and three, and Anna.

Catherine and I were both stressed about the prospects of confining Kelly, Beckett and Rhys in a car for the better part of a day.  Our trio are all great little guys but they are all still very young and can behave like unbridled, green, swap land imps when they get tried, hungry, and bored - a certainly in triplicate on this road trip.  We imagined endless harmonic waves of screaming, a meltdown in high def, 3-D. While the Odyssey was armed with a cache of new DVD’s from the library for entertaining Beck and Rhys during the long highway run, I gambled and chose to run a video free environment for Kelly.

We thought the drive from Denver to Durango would, at best, be wasted time the kids and adults could endure together and then we’d carry on with our mountain vacation.  The road trip, it turned out, was an unexpected pleasure, giving me the rare, no, unprecedented opportunity to spend seven uninterrupted hours with Kelly, my startlingly bright, perpetually inquisitive four year-old son.  With the bustle of day-to-day life, work, and the demands of his two little brothers (and his mother), the drive from Denver to Durango was the longest time Kelly and I had ever spent together, just the two of us, father and son - an unforeseen gift of quality time.

At first, Kelly wasn’t talking much, so I a started a game of count the cars, a game, which, turns out, at 10 a.m. on a major Denver highway, is supremely difficult.  I suggested we pick a color.  Kelly picked white – still too hard.  We needed a color that Kelly could count at a reasonable measure and I could count without the fear of driving off the road, so I offered up blue - manageable but we still were hitting double digits in just a few miles.  Next, we tried yellow - rare but not as rare as you’d think if, like we were, you’re counting delivery trucks and boxes-on-wheels, the Ryder trucks.  Anyway, count the cars petered out by the time we hit Genesee and I could still see Denver’s skyline in the rear view. Oh super-pooper crap, this is going to be a long trip, if Kelly was already bored.

Genesee just happened to be a place I’d taken the boys on numerous “Daddy Adventure Days” to sled, create snow people, stomp in the woods, and observe the local heard of bison.  As we neared the bison viewing area, I quizzed Kelly, “Do you remember what animals live near here?”

“Ohhh, the buffalo.”

“Yes, right, the buffalo, the bison heard lives just at the top of this hill.  Remember when we’ve stopped to look at them this winter? Do you think they’ll be there today?”

“Yes, I remember them and the poop.”

“Oh, well.  It looks like the bison are somewhere else today.”

Kelly replied, “Where did the buffalo go?” 

And his questions did not stop for the next seven hours.  Questions - astonishing questions - continuously formed the meaty depths of his developing brain and, as mile after mile ticked off the odometer, like the swollen river on our 9 o’clock for much of the trip, the questions flowed mightily out of his articulate mouth.

We talked about everything. For the first half of the trip, everything included the vast swath of Colorado’s high country Kelly could see, perched on his monkey-faced booster seat, from the passenger-side window.

“Look, a waterfall!  Where does the water come from?”

“Look the tunnel.  I’ve been in this tunnel.  Why did they make this tunnel?  Couldn’t we just drive over the mountain? How do you make a tunnel?”

"Look birds. What kind of birds are those? How do birds fly so high?"

From mile one to 385, Kelly, like Catherine’s favorite Sunday evening call from the Lupis Foundation telemarketer, regularly pinged me with the question, “Are we in 1^st place?”  Our first-born son, has a serious case of ECS (eldest child syndrome) and, as a symptom, is constantly concerned about his comparative position in the pecking order.   On rare occasion, when I had to inform him we were “a close 2^nd””, I felt, for one of the first times in his young life, like I was seriously failing him as a father.  No, not really. Well, maybe, this statement has a shade of truth, but, damn, that Honda Odessy has geddy up on the highway and Catherine’s not shy about putting her foot down, on the gas pedal or otherwise.  Sorry, son.

Either way, Kelly, Crash, my luscious big cherry red and white mountain bike (she’s so delicious I sometimes urn to link her dirty bottom bracket) reached the Eagle exit in first place.  This time I had a question, “Kelly, do you remember who lives, here, in Eagle?”

“Yes, Aidan, Alex and Antie Steph!  Can we wave to them?”  And Kelly started waving, sweetly, to his life long buddy, Aidan, and his little sister, who he might have a thing for. 

I waved along, too, smiling at my little boy and his generous heart.

Fifteen minutes and twelve questions later, I was telling him about Glenwood Canyon and how the river use to be way up at the top, up there, and over a very, very long time the flowing water eroded the rock away the river, cut into the rock and made the canyon.

“What’s eroded mean?“

“Good question.” And I took a stab at explaining this complex, eon-long process as simply as I could.  Kelly seemed to understand exactly what I was explaining and, as I concluded, he even synthesized a brief summary of my lesson on erosion. 

“Do people climb these mountains?" Kelly’s questioned.  “How does a mountain climber get a rope up there to climb it?”  We talked a little bit (because I only know a little bit) about top-roping and lead climbing a mountain.

After we cleared the 8-mile long 40 M.P.H. construction zone clogging Glenwood Canyon, I revved her back up to speed.  Conferencing with mama behind us, it was too early for lunch in Glenwood, but Rifle, another 25 miles down stream, would be an ideal place to grab a quick meal before pressing on to Purgatory. 

It was noon, we were loosing elevation and the temperature was climbing on Colorado's Western Slope.  I, being a cheep ass, in a long line of cheep-asses, ignored the A.C. and rolled down some windows and deployed the sunroof to ventilate the truck.  Kelly loved this maneuver.  The rush of wind in his face made him smile.  Then, he stuck his hand out the window.  A grin then a giggle bubbled through him as the turbulence from our 76 mph dash to Rifle pushed against his hand, moving it up down and all around.  Kelly’s usual position in the minivan is in the way back next to an inoperable window, so, maybe, he’s never really had a chance to do some proper hand flying.  Sorry, son, I have failed you, yet again.  He, of course, asked why the wind moved his hand.  We discussed aerodynamics, as Kelly’s hand knifed the wind.

Kelly’s laughs and giggles flipped without benefit of a warning shot to a bowel-flipping sheik (unfortunately, a common occurrence in many tales of thy three sons), “Pillow pet!!!!!! Pillow, pill, pill, pillow peeeeet!”

The hard road had just given Kelly another unexpected and cruel lesson in aerodynamics.  He, apparently, wanted to let his dogie Pillow Pet, Crash, have a turn sticking his head out the window.  It did not go well for Crash.  The wind grabbed Crash and, before Kelly knew what hit him, his beloved pillow pet was tumbling down I-70 at 76 mph. It took me a few seconds to decipher Kelly’s hysterical wailing and deduce what had happened to good old Crash - upholstered road kill, lost forever.

“Oh, Kelly.  I’m so sorry. You can’t stick things out the window.  It’s just a pillow.  We can get another one.”

“Get pillow pet. Get pillow pet. Get pillow pet. Get pillow pet!!!!!! Cra, cra, cra, Craaaaassh!!!!”

“Oh, honey we can’t turn around or stop on the highway. It’s too dangerous. We’ll get you another one,” replied with as much calmness and sympathy as I possessed.          

My phone started buzzing four seconds after Crash was rudely sucked out the window.  Catherine had seen a flash of something fly out of our window and was concerned.  I answered the call with Kelly still full-on freaking out behind my right ear.

“What was that?”

“Pillow pet is gone.”

“That was the pillow pet?” 

“Yes.”

“Tell him we’ll get him another one.”

 “I did, of course.  I’m gona let you go – gotta situation here.  See you in Rifle.”

Our Summer Vacation, Part II: Sleep deprivation and halitosis in Purgatory, coming soon!

Mama, mama, mama!

Catherine making friends with a goat.

Mama, mama, mama, is all the boys seem to say these days.  Daddy is second fiddle by two miles (3.2 km for my Canadian friends) at our home on Milwaukee Street. With good reason, yes sir. Kelly, Rhys and Beckett's devoted mother and my beloved wife, Catherine Delaney, is the most remarkably loving, genuinely friendly and infinitely caring creature on our blue-green orb. With complete strangers, the Queen of England, or our cleaning crew, Catherine treats and greets everyone the same with her beaming, toothy smile, kind hazel eyes, and a radiating warmth that can soften the soul of even the most harden old shisters (Dick Chaney, etc).

On our recent week-long sailing trip around the Grenadine Islands, while I relaxed, joyously ploughing through four books and generally avoiding all human contact other than persons employed in the food service industry, Catherine transformed herself into the de facto US ambassador to the Lesser Antilles and the Miami-Dade Airport.  We logged over ten hours in concourse D of Dade during our mechanical migration to and from the islands, giving Catherine plenty of time to troll for travelers in need of a friend, if only for an hour or two minutes.  She must have brightly exclaimed, "Andrew, meet my new friends!" seven times before we even set sail from Bequia Island. 

Catherine waving hidy-ho to her islander chums.

By the time we left our layover hotel in Barbados, my bride had befriended the entire pool side bar and restaurant staff of native islanders, giving them all a hug, receiving line style, upon our departure.  When we returned a week later to the same hotel before flying home, after a round of reunion hugs and "Hey, girlfriends" with the staff, Catherine was granted a room upgrade by doing nothing more than flashing her dental work (Ocean View, King room with a kitchenette), and she was supplied a cocktail on the house from her BFF waitress pal.

And it goes without saying the cheeky crew of our catamaran, Captain Jack and First Mate Jamie, are coming to Denver for an extended visit sometime soon, if Catherine has any say in the matter. Catherine and the crew bonded over her ipod playlists and, graciously, after just the first night's festivities, she decided to bestow them the device, of course. She'd give an ipod to new friends and the shirt off her back to, well, anyone.  Speaking of which...

So, the last night of the our vacation we're back at port and we have one more big night out on the town.  One more night to pretend we don't have a sackful of tiny kids waiting for us in Denver or self-important, do-gooder careers saving the children and such.  The group cabbed it over hill and dale, to the Firefly, a small boutique hotel sprouting from a fruit plantation on the quite side of the island.  Someone in our group said the rustic hotel perched on a hill could have been a Hemingway hideout.

We had drinks and drinks and diner and more drinks.  Before you know it Catherine had convinced, cajoled and, in a few cases, shamed 17 normally rational adults, now buzzed and stuffed with seafood curry, into skinny dipping in the hotel pool (a private out of the way pool with more light fixtures than ideal for some of our party).  A few minutes after I did my award-winning, signature naked cannonball, Catherine hopped out and, naked, rounded up a load of towels and passed them out, mostly naked, so we all could make a more modest escape than she.

K, R, B are lucky to share a mommy with the capacity for so much love.  I can't blame them for vying  for every ounce of her boundless adoration.

Click here for fun photos of our trip! 

Mommy with Beckett in his recycled Halloween costume (Kelly the Tiger, 2007)

Good Stuff in Jackson Hole

The annual ski trip to Jackson Hole with the cousins resumed this year, unfortunately without Beckett and Catherine due to Beckett's second hospitalization of the season.

Kelly skied for the first time this week. The first day was a test of my physical strength, dragging Kelly along between my legs as he found his balance on his tiny 80 cm boards, pulling him up from frequent crashes and hoisting him onto the lift. He improved everyday, thanks to Uncle Pat's training harness, and by the end of the week was turning a little and stopping, sometimes.

The seven of us took a break from skiing on Wednesday and visited the Elk refuge, taking a jarring, horse drawn wagon ride out into the middle of the 5,500 head heard. The kids enjoyed the bumpy parts of the ride, when we rolled off the dirt path into the meadow, and the first 75 seconds of elk watching.

Thursday, we took the tram to the top of the mountain and treated the big kids to waffles smeared with jam, Nutella and brown sugar butter for lunch, the specialty of the rustic Corbit's cabin. The sunny ride up in the new tram had given us awesome views of the Jackson valley and the mountain range on the other side of the Hole. With waffles from the top of the world filling our guts, we headed down the tram in an unexpected snow storm for another afternoon doing laps on the bunny hill.

Kelly had a breakthrough day on his skies, day 3, making his first real turns and generally keeping pace with Cole and Nora. Kelly had a few falls toward the end of afternoon and wouldn't move a mussel to attempt to right himself. He just lay limp in the snow precisely in the same position he fell. The little kid skiing schedule dictated that Kelly skip naps the entire week and the littlest of the big kids seemed to be waring down. He was still having fun, though, and showed no volitle fits of frustration as had happened in day one and two. Halfway down the last run of the day, Kelly looked skyward and started singing nonsense. I barked to look where he was going or to turn, but didn't seem to hear my commands and continued his giggling singing song. I dragged Kelly up a few short flights of stairs and he staggered into the ski locker area. After I helped him strip off his Sponge Bob helmet and goggles, Kelly dropped to his knees and mumbled, "Everything's blue. Why is everything blue, dad?" His Nutella waffle power had run down to emty, so we refeuled, as we did most days apre ski, in the Teton Club's great room with a petite cup of hot (Kelly prefers his hot coco one degree above room temp) coco. Good stuff, really.

Rhys, somewhat ignored and saddled most of the week with a sitter while big people skied, got every one's attention the morning of our departure by spewing a frothy puddle of acrid OJ and lumpy oatmeal on the breakfast table. Bad-bellied, big boy seemed better but fussier than normal as we hurried to pack, muscled our way through the mob of huffy vacationers heading home at the JHole airport, and waited in line after line.

Well, two hours after leaving the comforts of the Teton Club, we finally navigated the gauntlet of incompetent airline employees, TSA check points, and sank into seats 18 E & D (middle and window) on our oversold flight. Kelly and Rhys did a great job for the first half of of the 65 minute flight snacking on goldfish, sipping flavored water from sippy cups, paging through the in-flight magazine and generally handling the rigors and stresses of the morning with more poise and ease than their exhausted pop and our most of our fellow travelers.

Rhys climbed up on my lap and cuddled up for a cat nap on my shoulder. An announcement from the cockpit informing us we would be landing in twenty minutes ended his ten minute snooze. Rhys lifted his sleepy head and looked me square in the eye and burped. After a three count delay, two dollops of regurgitated, pureed gold fish crackers escaped Rhys' maw, sticking on his blanky draped over his chest and, luckily, missed me. As I tended to the minor mess with a handy wet wipe, I was jolted by a slurry of well chewed bagel and cream cheese briefly marinated in orange Vitamin Water and stomach acid. The point blank blast of rank gut juice soaked me from my shirt collar to mid-thigh. I was able to soak up and block a portion of Rhys' surprise puke attack with his blanky, but we were both quite stinky and sodden.

At this point, Rhys was wailing with tears streaming and vomit dripping from his pudgy chin, Kelly was shrieking between dry heaves (Kelly is sensitive to foul fragrances) and I was stuck in the middle seat managing the mayhem, blocked in by our row mate, a young musclebound guy hinding behind his fly-like, fancy, fashionable (ladies?) sunglasses. This poor guy lost the seat lottery in a big way that day. As folks filed off the plane, I overheard a boy six or seven rows infront of us ask, "Mom, what's that stinky smell?"

"Someone got sick. Just breath through your mouth, Jimmy," she replied.

Good stuff, good stuff.