At the beginning of this year, as I mentioned a few posts ago, I was involved in a play that required me to be away from the house every weeknight for almost two months. Needless to say this put somewhat of a burden on my wife’s shoulders and everything was left up to her. Midway through the cycle was Valentine’s Day, on which I promised my wife a getaway (“The Date”) with just the two of us, a dining experience at our favorite restaurant in the city, and a hotel stay away from the children. I made plans with the in-laws to sequester watch the children, and everything was going to be perfect. This brings me to the first step…
Step 1: Make a solid plan, work out the details, and then change it at or near the last minute.
They say rules are meant to be broken and apparently plans are meant to be changed. It was a week before The Date when my wife remembered that she had a meeting on the Friday we were supposed to depart, which meant we couldn’t leave until Saturday. As it turned out, my mother-in-law also remembered at that time that she would be out of town.
Did I say town? I meant state. Unfortunately tele-sitting hasn’t really taken on, so she was out. In light of these events, we pushed the date out to ‘sometime in the future’.
Fast forward a month and we somewhat haphazardly decide that the second to last weekend in March would work.
“Maybe.”
“We’ll see.”
Step 2: Develop Plan B. A shell of the original plan to be sure, but stick to it. No matter what.
The Date got closer and we realized that there were many things that needed doing, so instead of changing The Date, we simply scrunched it to a fraction of its original intended size in order to accommodate those pesky life things. Things like working a job fair for a few hours the morning of The Date that was unforgotten until a couple days before. Things like Taekwondo class immediately prior to heading out of town. Or even things like purchasing a lawn mower a few days prior that turns out to not be in stock and then arrives the morning of The Date, but after driving there to pick it up they realize they forgot to install a part so you’re not really able to pick it up because installing that will take another half hour which will make you late for the aforementioned Taekwondo class, so you drive away and then come back to find out the part isn’t the right one so they’ll need to order a new one, but they do let you pick it up with a promise to deliver the part when it arrives in a few days, and all this will end up taking 2 hours out of your life while you drive back and forth discovering all that information.
Y’know. Things. But despite those things we were going on The Date.
Step 3: Distribute children at various points across town.
The oldest spent the weekend with a friend. The middle one spent the night with another friend. The youngest spent the night with my parents. All of them were dropped off at their respective locations at different parts of the day, which necessitated multiple trips to the various places. It would have certainly been more efficient to drop them all off during the same trip, but where’s the fun in that?
Step 4: Mow the grass.
I mean, we had a brand new mower, and even though it was missing a part we could still cut grass with it. You might as well mow the jungle front yard that probably has the neighbors talking. After all the old mower has been kaput for weeks. Dinner reservations aren’t until 6pm – you’ll have plenty of time.
Step 5: Remember that your oldest is missing some school books and will need them to do some homework while you’re gone.
What do you mean you don’t know where that notebook is? Hasn’t she kept all her things in a single place? You mean they are scattered on the floor of her room? And the play room? And the kitchen? And the dining room? She needs what? Where’s her bag?
Yep, it was just like that.
Step 6: Leave the house late.
At this point my wife was ready to call it quits and give up on The Date. We were leaving about 3 hours after we originally planned (which was about 3 weeks after we really originally planned), and were now having a night away rather than a weekend. I persisted with our departure, and we finally left.
Time? 2:15pm.
Step 7: Realize you’re actually pretty hungry and might not last another 4 hours before eating.
There’s nothing worse than being hangry. We stopped a mere 20 minutes into our journey for some convenience store snacks.
Step 8: Spill stuff in the car on the way.
Preferably like a half bottle of Gatorade. One of those big ones. And then while you’re trying to move stuff out of the orange puddle, spill an entire bag of cheese crackers. Those will be real fun to clean up now that they’re all soppy!
Step 9: Utilize technology like GPS to simplify your travel. It’s way smarter than you.
We continued on the adventure (which it most definitely was at this point) and decided to input the destination into GPS so that we could route around traffic if necessary. First, however, we wanted to see if we could walk from the hotel to the restaurant. My wife put in the two locations by name and received an immediate reply (paraphrasing): ‘Are you sure you want to drive? It’s really close so you should walk you lazy sloth.’ She chose ‘No’ and received an error. So she tried again. She chose ‘Yes’ this time and received a travel time of…
…zero minutes.
You see, the restaurant was INSIDE the hotel, and GPS tried to tell us we were idiots without actually saying it. Definitely smarter than us.
So with that settled, we decided to check on traffic…
Step 10: Get stuck in traffic. A lot. Then reroute and get stuck in the rerouted traffic since EVERYBODY IS USING GPS AND LIKELY HAS ACCESS TO THE THE SAME TRAFFIC DATA YOU HAVE.
We got stuck in traffic more than an hour outside of the city. You know it’s a lot of traffic when you keep panning on the GPS app and see nothing but a red line forever and ever. Even when you zoom out to the state level.
Sigh.
So we crawled and crawled. Then we exited because by now a bathroom break is needed. Then we got rerouted along with another hundred or so cars, which essentially defeats the purpose of rerouting. Of course, you don’t realize that until you get onto the 2-lane road with cars as far as the eye can see and no hope of an exit. Where’s the interstate again?
Step 11: Arrive at the hotel at the time of your reservation. For dinner.
We checked in with minutes to spare and immediately get a text saying our table was ready. Awfully pushy, aren’t they? We quickly change out of our road clothes and into our dinner attire. Thankfully the restaurant was in the hotel. Complete accident, but a fortuitous one! We walked downstairs 4 minutes past our reservation and proceeded to have a wonderful evening of dining.
Step 12: Plan some TV or movie entertainment since you never get to do that, then fall asleep instead.
We finished eating and went back to the hotel room with the intentions of watching movies into the night and promptly fell asleep as soon as our bodies stopped moving. When we woke up the next morning we remembered just how deep you can sleep when you know you won’t have a kid waking you up at any point during that sleep. Man, that’s some good sleep…
Oh yeah, I forgot the last step…
Step 13: Pack all your stuff up and get back home because your real life awaits.
We hurried home, rounded up the kids from their various locations, and headed to my parent’s house to celebrate my dad’s belated birthday with my brother and his family.
Welcome back to the real world.
Ah well, it was good while it lasted.
