Vacation – Day 1

As I said a couple of days ago, our vacation this year is pretty low key. No Disney blowout, like last summer. No week in Hawaii, like the trip Sandy and I took in September. We just don’t have the money or energy for it this year, not after moving into the new house.

Instead, we decided to drive across the great (?) state of Missouri to St. Louis, to spend a few days taking the kids around the sights of that fair city. The drive from our house to our hotel was slated for about four hours, according to Google Maps, but the route consisted almost exclusively of taking Interstate 70, the portion maintained by the Missouri Department of Transportation, which means we could have fallen into an Isuzu Rodeo-sized chuckhole as soon as we crossed the state line and never have been heard from again. Somehow I’m thinking the good folks at Google don’t have the size of typical Missouri road hazards built into their travel time calculator.

Knowing this, and knowing that we would be leaving on a weekday, we decided to get up and clear the house really early. That’s typically a rotten way to start a vacation, in my experience. As far as I’m concerned, any non-work day that starts with an alarm clock going off at 5:30 in the morning is already fighting an uphill battle to be ultimately judged a good day. Still, we didn’t see much alternative if we wanted to have any time in St. Louis on Tuesday. So we threw the luggage in the back, threw some energy bars and water bottles in a backpack, grabbed our Google Maps directions and cleared our subdivision by 6:30 in the morning, yawning all the while.

Now, as I’ve said before, I hate Missouri. I went to the University of Kansas, which means I hate Missouri on general principle anyway, but I’ve also lived close enough to Missouri, and visited it frequently enough, to have formed a concrete negative opinion about the entire state. The reasons are myriad, and I won’t bother you with every single detail. Suffice it to say that my first road trip game for the kids to play yesterday once we crossed into Missouri was to have them start counting billboards that advertised fireworks stands. For some reason, there are more stores selling fireworks in Missouri than any other state in the union, and there are a ridiculous number of billboards on Missouri’s major highways advertising these establishments. (Not surprisingly, a couple of other major billboard categories in Missouri are for personal injury lawyers and head injury clinics. I’m not even kidding.)

Anyway, the billboard counting got pretty old as soon as it became clear that finding these gems wouldn’t take much effort. In the first twenty-odd miles of our drive, we averaged a fireworks billboard once per half-mile, and that pretty much killed that game. No matter, because we are all experienced road-trippers, and generally have a really good time with some of the simplest, stupidest things you can imagine. For instance, I do accents. Lots of them. And I do them pretty well, if you don’t mind me blowing my own horn a little. Not only that, but each accent has its own little character that goes along with it. During a long car ride, nothing keeps the wife and kids entertained more than hearing me tossing out one of my odd-accented characters whenever something along the route strikes me the right way. For example, there’s a local chain of tractor and feed supply stores called Feldman’sthat have always caused me to launch into the character of a guy named Max Feldman, complete with stereotyped New York Jewish accent. The thought of a Jewish guy from New York owning a string of tractor supply stores in the Midwest just cracks me up, and I craft that character accordingly.

So yesterday, after the firework billboards got too boring, we passed a western wear store called Kleinschmidt’s. This served as a perfect opportunity to have Max Feldman visit the car to talk about how his cousin Arnie Kleinschmidt followed him out to the boonies from New York once he saw how successful the tractor supply stores were. (”Come west, Arnie! These hayseeds can’t buy enough of this stuff! Sell ‘em some boots and bib overalls to wear while they ride my tractors! It’s gold!“. And yes, everything Max Feldman says ends with an exclamation point.)

Like I said, stupid, but we find it endlessly entertaining. On top of the appearance of these characters, we also found easy amusement in any number of unexpected things that seem to happen on any road trip that are just inherently hilarious. For instance, we passed about fifty places yesterday that claimed to be selling “antiques”. Apparently the entire state of Missouri is one giant, outdoor Sotheby’s. Who knew? One of these fine establishments was called Artichoke Annies Antique Mall. Maybe I’m just not a serious antiquer, but I generally don’t associate the word “artichoke” with my antiques. Or the word “mall” either, for that matter. But it must work for Annie, so bless her heart.

I think we must have inadvertantly driven through the fine arts section of Columbia, Missouri, because almost directly across the highway from Artichoke Annie’s was Hazel Kinder’s Lighthouse Theater. No joke, this fine establishment, located in almost the geographic center of the contiguous United States, several hundred miles from any ocean, is modeled after a lighthouse. How Hazel Kinder struck upon this particular name for her theater is such a curiosity to me that I was sorely tempted to stop and ask. Alas, the schedule didn’t permit it, so down the road we want cackling when we saw on my Blackberry that The Drifters had just announced their long-awaited return engagement to the Lighthouse Theater this coming December. I just might make a special effort to see that one.

Fortified by encounters such as these, the White family giggled our way across Missouri. We enjoyed ourselves so much, in fact, that we were nearly to our destination before we realized that I-70 was, well, smooth. Sandy and I both reached the shocking conclusion that MoDOT must have actually, you know, worked to get that road into really good shape. There were very few construction zones. There were no king-sized chuckholes. The road was actually (gulp) passable. That’s right, I said it. Something traditionally horrible about Missouri was actually a pleasant surprise.

Hey, early alarm or not, any day that ends with a Jayhawk saying something nice about Missouri must have been pretty good.