A Wacky Holiday

In 1985, my Mom won a cruise  to the Bahamas from her job.  Because it was just a trip for 2, I had to stay home.  I wanted to stay home with my sister Lori, but she was a bit of a wild child, and Mom didn’t trust her. Option number 2: stay with my sister Julie in West Virginia.  The only problem with that was that around Thanksgiving time, Moorefield was hit by a flood and just about wiped off the face of the map.  “it’s only for a week, it’s not going to hurt you, check out some books from the library and take your homework with you if you have any,” Mom said.  So, that was a very boring Christmas vacation for me, as you can only read so much and watch so much TV, because that’s about the only things I could do.  OK, now enough about me (for now), so on to the fun stuff…

 

To get to the cruise ship, Mom and Dad had to fly from Dulles Airport to Miami.  Dad found out really fast that he was afraid of flying.  Mom said, the longer the flight went, the greener Dad got, and the longer it went, the more a guy in the next aisle drank.

 

So they made it to Miami, got on the cruise ship, and had a good time, but when they returned to Miami, Dad said “you can fly if you want, but I’m not.”  So they looked for a car, but the only thing they could find was a U-Haul truck, so they drove it back hone to Fairfax to get their car and then drive up to Moorefield to pick me up.  A large truck hauling just them and 2 pieces of luggage.

 

Now for a funny postscript:

 

When we got back home, I was totally exhausted, so I went to bed. When I was a kid, I slept pretty soundly, and when I woke up, I had a habit of losing all sense of time.  So I get up sometime in the night, thinking its maybe 1 or 2 in the morning to go to the bathroom, I noticed that the bathroom door was shut, but being half asleep, I did nothing but open the door and…

I get hit by a blast of stem, and see a figure wrapped in a towel ,and immediately begin screaming my  lungs out.  What has happened was that my sister Lori had put a piece of wood into out wood stove that was a bit to big for the stove or at a bad angle and knocked the stovepipe lose a bit. Dad had fixed, it got ashes and soot all over himself, and took a showe to clean up.  So quite a fun time for all hehe.