Family Vacation Comes Ripping
Now, firmly in my forties, my wife and I tend to take two types of vacations: beach, or site-seeing, as we call them. "Where do you want to go this time, beach or site-seeing?" we'd ask each other. "Beach," meaning we go somewhere on this earth that has an ocean adjacent, sandy beach, one that serves fruity, alcoholic beverages to be imbibed for a week while we do little else than relax on said beach. "Site-seeing" is just that – we visit a place that has a bevy of sights worth seeing, and we wander between them, experiencing what they have to offer, stopping periodically along the way for alcohol infused beverages. Recently we took a "site-seeing" trip to Brno, another larger city in the Czech Republic, about a two hour train ride from our home base in Prague. We indeed saw the sites. Mostly bones. They have a catacomb/crypt there. Rest assured, if we travel to your town and it has a notable pile of bones, we'll fucking see them.
Seeing as we're now calling Prague home we're afforded a legally required bounty of vacations days, an amount that dwarfs the ewe es of aye's, checking my notes, zero vacation days required by law, so we have plenty of time to take advantage of them at a beach, site-seeing, or both, even.
As a child, and snotty teenager, my family also had two types of vacations: "event" vacations that would take us to a Disney World type of place, or, "family" vacations, where we'd travel to see one, or the other side, of my extended family, my mother's located Las Vegas, Nevada, or my father's in Syracuse, New York. Sometimes a family vacation would be combined with an event vacation, an easy enough prospect in Las Vegas. There was no events to be had in Syracuse, unless you count the time I was ten years old or so and we drove to Buffalo, New York, and parked on a strangers lawn for five American dollars so we could attend the joint musical performances of Sir Elton John, and Billy Joel at the Buffalo sporting arena. I do not count this.
Speaking of driving, often times event vacations were road trips. The family packed into a completely brown conversion van replete with a bed and dining table, later sold for the nineteen hundred and nineties middle class family success trophy, a minivan. Criss-crossing America we'd be taken to places like Mount Rushmore, or the Grand Canyon, where my folks would then drag myself and my brother's highly uninterested bodies along with them as they gazed, awe-inspired, at America's grandest landmarks.
One such driving/event vacation was to be held the winter of nineteen hundred and ninety seven, or ninety eight, in the mountainous Coloradan town of Fraser. The time of year was chosen so we could stay in a rustic cabin and partake of the town's supposed legendary sledding hill, then rent snowmobiles and cruise around.
There it is. Fraser, Colorado.
Turns out, Fraser is a million hour drive from my comfy, non-mountainous abode in Aurora, Colorado. I was, at the time, 15 or 16 years old, deeply entrenched in my punk rock attitude, and stylings, and did not want to ascend icy, mountain slopes with my family. I had more pressing things to attend to, mainly listening to the Misfits album "Earth AD" which I had recently purchased on compact disk format to accompany the Discman, a device used to play but one compact disc at a time "on the go." This particular model of Discman featured several levels of "skip protection," a function that served to keep your compact disk from skipping, interrupting the playback of music with a jarring leap ahead in the song, while you were out and about. Say, if I were out skateboarding, or getting rowdy, I would be secure in the knowledge that my copy of, oh let's say, the Exploited's "Beat the Bastards" would remain undisturbed. This Discman replaced my previous one that I lent to my friend Ken for one high school class period, after he swore to me up, down, left, and right that he'd be careful with it. Subsequently it was "stolen" from him. Typical.
Behold it, in all its glory.
Sitting in my basement bedroom, head phones on, listening to the furious howls of Glen Danzig going on about severed heads and half wasp, half human monstrosities was my preference for spending time. Having to trudge through snow in the mountains was directly counter to that, but I had no say in the matter. We were going on a family vacation. Lucky for me the Discman was portable, that being its main design feature. So, I grabbed Earth AD, loaded up on double-A batteries, and piled myself, with my attitude, into the minivan for family time.
The drive from Aurora to Fraser lasted no less than an eternity. Earth AD is barely over twenty minutes long so I managed to listen to it, joyfully, about fifty thousand times during the drive. Picturesque winter scenes ricocheted right off my uninterested eyes as I listened to punk songs about werewolves shredding people to bits, and what kind of people go to the "green hell."
Perfection.
I knew I could not be allowed to spend all of this frozen vacation listening to Earth AD as my parents had brought us all the way here for reasons unrelated to my musical enjoyment. For instance, spending quality, family time together, which was to commence immediately upon arriving at our snow ensconced cabin. The property rental office also happened to function as video rental and stovetop popcorn store. For tonight's family time was selected a foil-covered tray of Jiffy Pop, and the Hollywood blockbuster "Volcano," staring... somebody.
Apparently, not in tune with the cabin's would be modern stove one hundred years ago, my mother burned the Jiffy. My father, ever the penny pincher, insisted we eat it despite its slightly charred texture. So we sat, as a family, eating overdone Jiffy-ed popcorn, and watched Volcano, the premise of which there's a heretofore discovered volcano in Los Angeles, and it's wreaking havoc on the place. My father could not handle the ludicrous plot and all it's "Hollywood fake science hogwash" and clucked and guffawed the whole time through. Never mind he was the one who had chosen this flick. I wondered if Earth AD would provide a better soundtrack to the lava-fleeing denizens of Los Angeles instead of whatever this overwrought fanfare the movie was providing, and decided it likely would have been. Alas, I was stuck, Earth AD-less, while volcanic carnage rained down on California.
After the movie it was lights out as tomorrow would be big day, sledding in Fraser, but for now, in my shared room with my brother, I had headphones connected to a Discman containing the righteous horror-fueled songs of the Misfits waiting to carry me off to sleep.
When you picture sledding perhaps you think of a neighborhood park, packed with rambunctious kids decked out in winter snow gear, excitedly dragging their sleds behind them uphill for another joyous go flying down the snow packed hill. The sledding hill I stood in front of was not that experience. Secretly I suspected this destination would be something different than our neighborhood park as to justify the trek into the frozen, bereft, wintered Rocky Mountains but I don't think I was quite ready for what I did find. Before me stood a massive, fairly vertical, ice-packed hill stretching higher than the eye could see. When we arrived people were sailing down it at sound barrier breaking speeds, the hungry, slanted slope claiming dozens of knit winter caps that had been blasted from once snug heads. After their run came to a halt, and the sledders had collected and straightened themselves out, they ran with their sleds to a rotating, pulley system tow rope that, presumably would hoist them back to the top of the gargantuan hill for another death-defying plummet.
Trust me, it looks much bigger in real life.
I, of course, brought my Discman with me so watching this gory display of human sledding chaos while Danzig screamed the lyrics to "Death Comes Ripping" (you feel the heat as death comes ripping, rip your back out) made it seem more like a scene from a Mad Max movie than a fun-packed winter frolic. The grisly scene was interrupted by my father forcefully nudging me and pointing up the slant to indicate we were heading to the top now.
After paying the entrance fee we were ushered into a room to be met by a wilily, beard-exploded, wide-eyed ski bum who was to cover all the safety procedures for hurling yourself down a vertical, icy plane at the speed of light. After he covered all the ways this wintery attraction could exit us from this mortal coil he eyed us up and down and asked if there were any questions.
"Can I listen to my Discman?" I feverishly asked.
"No. Ears open," he jabbed at me.
Thwarted again. Was he in cahoots with my parents to force me into enjoying this event vacation?
With that we were issued our inflatable tubes and sent to the frozen precipice. Teetering on the edge, Discman-less, I slowly leaned over on my sled just enough and... POOF, I was careening downhill. I imagine this is what it must have felt like if instead of inside the cozy confines of the Millennium Falcon during a jump to light speed with Han, Chewy, and Obi-Wan Kenobi, Luke Skywalker was strapped to the satellite dish atop. The mere remembrance of it makes my currently forty two year old body quiver.
In a blink of an eye I had reached the bottom, slowly drifting to a stop. I immediately got up and grabbed my Millennium Falcon and verily ran to the toe rope, and was pulled back to the top to do it again, and again, and again, and again. You win this round, majestic wintery family vacation.
I slept well that night, exhausted from reluctantly having fun, drifting off, yet again, to the soothing sounds of Earth AD.
The next day's event was snow mobiles. My folks had reserved us each our own snow mobile which we were to ride at a specifically designed location for optimizing snow mobile entertainment.
An exact recreation of my snowmobile prowess.
When we arrived to our waiting, motorized winter carriages, there was no scruffy, seasonal employee dishing out safety protocol. After a quick rundown from my father (turn this to go, push this to stop) we were instructed to follow the path, which would lead us to a large, wintery racetrack. Free to do as I wished I got my Discman out and fired it up as my mother started saying something about "taking it easy," and "enjoying the scenery," but her voice was drowned out by Earth AD's opening screams of "WHOA, WHEN YOU FEEL LIKE YOU'RE GOING TO SLOW," as I pushed the proverbial pedal to the metal and left her in my snowy wake. My brother and father quickly followed, like bats out of hell.
The three of us blazed through the Colorado winter landscape, blasting snow behind us, the Misfits pumping in my ears, as the the trail opened up to a vast, snow covered valley, and said designated racetrack.
We must have made a half dozen loops before my mother slowly came creeping out of the trees to join us on the track. We proceeded to lap her a dozen more time, while she, Marge Simpson-like, slow and steadied herself around the track, "enjoying the scenery," likely fantasizing she had birthed two daughters instead of two sons, something she'd make up for later when my niece was born.
Eventually we had to head back and return our snow mobiles, only to blast to the return location in mere minutes just to wait for my mother to come casually rolling in ten minutes later, taking her half the runtime of Earth AD to catch up to us. Round two goes to the vacation.
With that our family excursion would be over. The next day we'd pile into the family minivan and head back down the mountain to suburban Aurora, me listening to Earth AD the whole way, keeping my teenage angst intact as to not let them know how much fucking fun I indeed had.
A living hell is not so bad.