Water (B)Logged

Ahh, the beginning of my fall vacation. S, my younger daughter, and E, my older daughter, went back to school this week. Overall, we had a marvelous summer together. They didn’t try to kill each other, not even last week when we were all on each other’s nerves, and I didn’t try to kill either one of them nor the man who impregnated me. So it was a success.

We started the summer with a trip to the beach, which is a great time to go because a lot of people push that beach trip back to right before school starts in August. The end of the summer is also when the jellyfish go on vacation, so waiting until then can be a big mistake. But that first week in June isn’t too crowded and isn’t too hot and my family isn’t too sick of one another yet. We went on a bigger trip to Washington DC the same month, which wasn’t the best plan, looking back, but we had a wonderful trip anyway. July came and went with more camp and another trip to the beach, which was both too hot and too crowded, and overall, too soon. Still, we enjoyed ourselves, which is good, because that is an awful lot of together travel time for it to be torture.

Then came August, the last two weeks of summer before school started. No camp. No beach trip. No trip of any kind. Just me and my girls. I expected that we would get really tired of spending all day together, every day, and fight and bicker and bitch. The end of the summer is tough anyway, because everyone is sick of the heat, sick of the pool, and sick of each other’s faces. But I held out hope that we would survive, and as it turned out, we had a few things on our to-do list we never got a chance to do. We did fit in a good many last minute play dates, though, as well as the obligatory trip to the local water park.

Water park is a generous term for the things we have in our area. When you think water park, you might conjure up great attractions like Blizzard Beach at Walt Disney World, or Wild Waters, or any of the lesser water parks associated with country music stars. Well, our local water parks are just fancy neighborhood pools. They have one or two water slides, an extremely lazy river, and a watery playground for the kiddies. They don't have a wave pool or gift shop, but they do have a small snack bar and a "no outside food" policy. These water parks are not an all day amusement, but they are cheap and less than a half an hour from home, so what more could I ask for?

We decided to give Shipwreck Cove a try. It was the first time we have been there, and lucky for me, JR and lil JR, her two year old, went along for the ride. Their presence meant I didn’t have to spend all day there, since lil JR still requires a daily nap and JR won’t allow lil JR to eat any of the crap they sell at the snack bar. We loaded up the car with our towels and sunscreen and off we drove, into the middle of nowhere. We didn’t bother with the GPS, and we got distracted before we remembered to follow the MapQuest directions, but luckily, there was an occasional road sign to give us enough help so that we didn’t accidentally stumble onto someone’s meth lab trailer.

We got there right after it opened so we could spend a good two hours there, which is all anyone really needs at a water park. We put our valuables in a rusty locker, found some unclaimed lounge chairs for our towels, and assessed the situation. The watery playground seemed like a great place to start since it was right up lil JR’s alley. It had a fake deserted island with misters hidden in the tree tops and a pirate ship with a couple of baby slides and a little watery bridge between them. I loved the pirate ship. Instead of a beautiful maiden gracing its hull, it had an overly muscular, shirtless, all gold Neptune/Pirate figure, sort of a Blackbeard with six-pack abs and the Midas touch. All around us, little redneck children crawled and shoved and pushed their way around the playground, because taking turns and waiting is so elitist. Really, with all the squirting water and wet little bodies sliding around, it was a pedophile's dream.

Alas, all that chaos got annoying pretty fast, so we worked our way over to the laziest river. We each grabbed a tube except for lil JR, who desperately wanted to grab one even though the tube was twice as big as she is and she can’t swim. Not being able to swim didn’t stop the little boy who clung to S’s tube. S’s asked him nicely to let go of her tube twice, which he refused to do, so she shoved him off of it instead. Then we watched him not know how to swim, panic, and go under. I grabbed the tube and pulled him up, showing him how to hang on to the handles, and asked him if he wanted me to help him, which he did. The next thing you know, I am going around the laziest river with someone else’s kid while my own kid looked at me from her new tube, confused and disgusted that I was helping a perfect stranger instead of bobbing along happily with her.

JR worked her way over to us, lil JR perched in front of her like a smug parrot, and told me that she had already pulled that kid out once. I asked him if he knew how to swim, but he wasn’t able to articulate a coherent answer, so I asked him if he was at the park with his mother. He claimed that he was, which I found out later wasn’t true. He was actually with a day care group, led by some high school dropout types who were too busy picking their nails and gossiping than supervising the children they were paid to watch. We floated past a bored lifeguard sporting a deep tan and a Rebel flag pendant which went nicely with his red swim trunks. After our one trip around the river, I worked my way over to the steps, where I persuaded the little boy to get a life vest and left him on back on shore, alone, while I rejoined my children. That was enough good deed for the day.

We attempted the water slides next. We all trudged over to the steps and stood in line, until we reached the top. JR and lil JR were immediately turned away for being too shrimpy, which would have been nice for them to know before they stood in that line. When it was my turn, I sat down in the chute and got a big faceful of water. I had remembered to wear glasses instead of my contacts, so while I needed windshield wipers, at least I didn’t lose my precious gas permeables to the splashdown at the bottom. What a splashdown it was, too! I sank like a cell phone in a toilet when I hit the water before rising to the surface and paddling my way over to the steps, which were blocked by an old man who didn’t understand he was not in the lap pool area despite being yelled at repeatedly by the lifeguards.

After that fun, we bobbed around in the regular pool for a while, watching the wild children be wild and their frightening parents alternate between ignoring them and screaming at them. Luckily, no used bandages floated by, and JR and I were able to enjoy the silverback gorilla coats, bad tattoos, and fat aprons of the other adults. We discreetly played a few rounds of name that genetic disorder, and then we did it all again, the playground, the lazy river, the water slides. I started to get a little bored, so when lil JR and S complained about being hungry, I was the first one out of the pool.

After changing our clothes in the nasty bathroom (is there such a thing as a pleasant water park bathroom?), we reloaded the car and meandered our way back home, only to find that JR lived really close to it. I know I couldn’t find it again; with my sense of direction, I am lucky I remember JR’s house, and I’ve been there a bunch of times.

That was the last hurrah of our summer. I developed a nice summer cold the day after Shipwreck Cove, courtesy I am sure of one of those germ carriers I encountered in the pool. And here I thought they didn’t have any souvenirs.