Observations on My Latest Kentucky Trip

1. My kids were consistently the best-behaved people in our car.

2. Car sickness is no fun—even when you are not the person doing the puking.

3. Thick fog is really, really cool-looking gliding over hills and valleys. Unless you are driving 80 miles an hour down a highway in Nowhere, Wisconsin. Then, it’s considerably less cool-looking.

4. Blue jeans are not proper hotel pool area attire, regardless of whether you choose to swim or not. With a humidity level that had to be nearing 200%, I am pretty certain I lost five pounds sitting there watching my kids swim.

5. Do not be alarmed! I more than made up for those five pounds while on my trip. Let’s just say that I had multiple intimate encounters with some licentious gravy and biscuits—and leave it at that.

6. The windmill farms of rural Illinois are still amazingly mesmerizing, which cannot be good for the Illinois traffic fatality record.

7. I am entirely too old to sleep on an air mattress on my brother’s living room floor. My back spasmed in just such a way that I bore a disturbingly strong resemblance to Quasimodo of bell tower fame.

8. I am also entirely too old to sleep in a queen-sized hotel bed with my two five-year-old twins. Ruanita faired only moderately better in bed with our feverish and hacking/coughing/choking/snotting nine-year-old. In all honesty, I believe we both need our own personal king-sized beds to be truly happy sleepers. Ruanita isn’t exactly receptive to that idea, however. Perhaps a few more family trips will change her mind.

9. My nine-year-old son is poised to win our annual NCAA bracket challenge. If that doesn’t speak to the “Madness” that happened this past weekend, I do not know what does. He’s beginning to think the glory he is going to win is a tiny bit less desirable than the cold, hard cash the second place winner (of legal gambling age) will get. Sorry, kid. You’re only nine.

10. When you are both feeling sad, and emotional, and just plain out of sorts over the death of a beloved family member—and you are hurling down a highway at near 85 miles an hour with five more hours of driving ahead of you—it is not the best time to tally the receipts from your trip. Do you really need to know at that very moment how much money you just forked over in a matter of five shorts days? Do you really need to have the conscious awareness that it is even possible to spend that much money in five short days? Do you really need to contemplate the vast amounts of food you purchased for your children—at various and sundry “down-home” eateries such as Randy’s Family Restaurant in Eau Claire, WI—that managed to just be thrown into the trash? Do you really need a mental visual of your hard-earned cash lying helpless at the bottom of a pile of cold, rubbery, that-color-simply-doesn’t-exist-in-the-natural-world macaroni and cheese? I would argue the answer is a resounding “no.”