Authors: Fay Jacobs
Time Fries! (18 page)
I've been trying to stay cool, in every sense of the word. That's how I wound up one day at Jungle Jim's Waterpark in Rehoboth.
In the fourteen years since Jungle Jim's and I have both lived in Rehoboth, we had never met before. Sure, we glanced at each other as I passed along Route One, with me wondering who on earth would stand in line on a hot summer day just to be hurled down an aluminum tube to certain drowning.
But then a friend had what she thought was a splendid idea for belatedly celebrating my 64th birthday. I wasn't even done asking, “Are you insane?” when five of us were in bathing suits, heading for the apocalypse.
Entering the park, my companions suggested we relax first on the Lazy River. We rode on tubes, swept along a curving, meandering route by a surprisingly swift current. Along the circuit we dodged a couple of overhead waterfalls, 3-foot seas from the wave pool and intermittent unruly behavior by adjoining twelve year olds. We giggled and guffawed, completing the circuit twice. Although tempted, no pre-teens were harmed in the making of this journey.
At the exit steps, trying to get myself out of the unflatteringly spread-eagled position I'd assumed in the tube, I squiggled and scrunched, flopped into the water, and heard a loud and clear “pop” from the vicinity of my right hip.
Crap. I envisioned the headline “Woman breaks hip on Lazy River.” Wanting to find out if I could stand, I stepped backward, got caught by the current, and was swept by the rip tide, tubeless, down river. Fighting the surge and squawking like a chicken I clung to the rock wall at the edge of the lazy good for nothing river, and struggled to get back the long six feet to the steps.
As panicked companions reached for me, I bobbed like Shelly Winters being extracted from the Poseidon's Lido Deck.
Back at the steps, I learned that yes, I could still walk, albeit with a great pain in my ass, literally.
Off we trudged to our next adventure, which in a 4-1 vote was the 5-person raft down the Stampede waterslide. Getting the five of us clowns into the Volkswagen raft created a bizarre tangle of legs and torsos, with me seated backwards, first to go down the chute. It didn't matter. I never opened my eyes.
Our overcrowded raft shot downhill on a hideously steep slope, careening at terrifying angles along the banked sides of the tube, crashing through walls of water and speeding dangerously toward oblivion. Yes, I reasoned, this raft was made for five people, but was it made for these five people? Would we be spit out the end, carom off the bottom to be launched over the bus station onto Route One? I don't think this is what the tourism folks had in mind with their Reach the Beach campaign.
Happily we landed in the water with no more than a thud and the humiliating prospect of untangling ourselves before a viewing public. I'm sure we were the biggest vessel to go down since Titanic. The lucky pair to dig out first voted our next activity to be the Anaconda slide, the most giant of all the giant slides. This time it was a two-person raft, for me and my spouse. I told the young person running the gig I had changed my mind and didn't want to go down. He clearly didn't want to hear me.
As he shoved us off, I spied the incredible roller coaster plunge we were about to take. I HATE roller coasters. My idea of a thrill ride is a BMW down Fifth Avenue. But down we plummeted, through stomach-dropping, screaming, Space Mountain corkscrew turns and then into massive, punishing walls of water. This was a roller coaster in a car wash and I was the bug on the windshield.
Then, air borne, we became Thelma and Louise. God I hated it.
Finally, the torture ended and we staggered back over to the Lazy River to decompress. This time en route I graciously
ceded my position to a small child and wound up, like Niagara's Maid of The Mist, directly under a torrential waterfall. No harm, no foul compared to the punishing Anaconda tsunami.
And, I am loathe to admit this, at the end of my lazy journey, I needed the assistance of an 11-year-old Good Samaritan to help get my Orca butt out of the raft. But all's well that ends well. As for my end, well, my right cheek hurt for days.
But like zip-lining before this, I didn't exactly enjoy the water slides but I'm glad I did it. Frankly, I'm done proving I can keep up with my mate on these adventures. Next time I will turn the other cheek and cruise along in the BMW.
Wait! Did somebody just mention bumper cars at Funland? Well, maybe just one more adventure. Most of my discs aren't slippedâ¦yet.
It was very nearly the perfect vacation. Maine lobsters, stunning Nova Scotia scenery, visiting the charming Prince Edward Island and a plan for our last three days on Campobello Island, off the coasts of Maine and New Brunswick.
Perfect is lovely for a vacation, unless of course, you are a writer with a deadline and perfect is, frankly, not that interesting. Face it, bad reviews are more fun to read than good ones; tragedy and comedy more compelling than, say, 300 pages of nice.
Ergo, I hoped for vacation column fodder. With my spouse driving and me riding shotgun in our behemoth RV with a Jeep hauled behind, me not the most avid camper and my mate not the most sympathetic to my anti-bug, anti-fresh air tendencies, there was great potential. But zilch, nothing. Nada. Oddly, I loved it all. Ah, the smell of Deep Woods Off in the morning.
I even took my paddle-phobic butt kayaking, fearful of capsizing, but half hoping drama would ensue. Hope floated. Nothing.
But just when it was safe to go back in the water, we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. We tried to find Campobello Island. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's summer home is now a museum there and I wanted to see it. That, and more stunning shoreline, lighthouses and lobster suppers.
The problem was, the shortest route from Canada was by two ferries, too small to handle our multi-vehicle traveling circus. We'd have to cross back into the U.S., drive another hour and reach the island via Maine's FDR Bridge. It sounded simple.
Instructing our GPS bitch on the dashboard to head for the FDR bridge, we set out around 6 p.m. However, without consulting us, the bitch determined the shortest route to be ferry to ferry, across the whole stupid island, accessing the
bridge bassackwards, from its Campobello side. We're so used to trusting these electronic babysitters, we didn't wake up and smell the seagull poop until she had us in line for the first ferry.
“Back up!” shouted the ferry staff, only you can't back up an RV towing a car unless you enjoy seeing both vehicles in the body shop. Sadly, we know this first hand. So I had to get out, amid a swarm of monster mosquitoes and use tarmac hand signals to guide our personal parade in an ungainly u-turn on a skinny gravel path. Going off road, we trampled several medium sized trees, shot gravel at a dozen cars and lodged a sapling in our windshield wiper.
So now it's 7:15 and we relaunched for Maine. This time I told GPS smarty pants I was doing the recalculating and sent her to the border as a via point to the bridge.
We made it to customs, where, just as they had done when we entered Canada, the agents spent a lot of time discussing whether the amount of booze we were carrying was over the legal limit. It was a rare instance of wishing I drank more the night before.
Back in the U.S, all was well until we were instructed to veer off in a peculiar direction and dontcha know that bitch managed to lead us to the second ferry we wouldn't be allowed to board.
Passing a bank parking lot with wide berth for another outsized U-turn, we were fully committed before spying the canopy over the drive-in banking lane. Slamming the brakes caused a ten-wheel squeal, and I got out to check the clearance.
“Abort!”
We would have sheared off the RV roof and dumped it onto the Jeep. It's rare you get a second chance to destroy your two vehicles at once, but here we were again. I watched as the driver bumped our motorcade up over a steep curb, wobbled it across a stretch of rutted turf, then bounced it back down again. By this time I'd been surrounded by a swarm of black flies and the booze the feds worried about was probably mixed drinks.
Backtracking yet again, our convoy finally got going the right direction but the GPS swore we'd arrive six minutes earlier than the current time on my watch. We were in a time warp, juggling Atlantic and Eastern Standard time zones.
“Recalculating!!” said the GPS.
“Oh, no you don't!” screamed the driver, unplugging the bitch and flipping her to the back of the bus. “No more of your friggin' shortcuts!”
We'd been on the road almost four hours for what we thought would be under two. Let's do the time warp again. We still had an hour or two to go depending whether we believed the arrival estimate had been a U.S. or Canadian calculation.
Driver (trying to turn left, peering past me to see): “Anything coming?”
Me: “Christmas.”
Driver: “Was I supposed to turn there?”
Me: “You know, being lost in an RV is better than being lost in a car. When you refuse to ask the gas station for directions we can just pull over, have nightcap and go to sleep.”
Driver, glaring: “If we get there I'm buying a t-shirt. It will be a collector's item. Who the hell can find this place?”
Me: “By the time we do, it will be sunrise at Campobello.” (GROAN)
Eventually the elusive bridge appeared. We crossed onto the island and immediately saw flashing lights. Customs, again. We'd crossed from Canada into Maine and now we were going back into New Brunswick, Canada.
Border Patrol: “Any pets with you?”
Me: “Not unless you count the two-pound mosquitoes in here.”
Border Patrol: “Any guns?”
Me: “No, If I'd had one I would have shot myself by now.”
Border Patrol: “How much liquor do you have aboard?”
Me: “Unfortunately, the same amount we had when we left your country several hours ago.”
Luckily I wasn't taken into custody.
By this time it was either midnight at the oasis or 11 p.m. and we'd flashed our passports, revealed we were unarmed and dogless, and explained our stash of Johnny Walker and Absolut ad nauseam.
But we made it to Campobello. And if GPS girl had not gone rogue, and if we had not gone border hopping and time warping, the vacation would have been utterly perfect. And that would have been too nice for words.