Thursday, March 4, 1993 Death-defying coasters and water slides by Alicia Hartman Co4u:Utor Well, Spring Break is only tne day away. Actually, some people have already left. As everyone is packing for Florida (Disney World/Daytona), heading south to Alabama to eet country-folk, or flying est to challenge the slopes of to enver, unfortunately, lam .oing nothing devastatingly xciting for Spring Break except orking. Whoo-whee. No, I an't even go home because I eady Lye, at home. Since I am not doing nything thrilling, I'm going to eminisce about a typical .nnual summer vacation for me land my family. My dad, mom, sister and I pack into the blue Oldsmobile. Andi (my sister) and I situate ourselves in the back seat along with our pillows, stuffed animals, food, deck of cards and pens and paper. My Uncle Norm, Aunt Nancy and cousin Melissa also joined us on our expedition. Vacationing with my uncle, aunt and cousin is pretty fun, except for the fact that my uncle always follow us and he drives as slow as molasses. My dad is the type of person who likes to get where he's going in the shortest time possible. Things are slow enough with my uncle behind us, but then my mom is totally illiterate , when it conies to " But aren't most by Dave Barry Syndicated Columnist Recently I stood in the kitchen of our new home, amid hundreds of cardboard boxes, all helpfully labeled "BETH", and watched my wife, Beth, open a box. She cut through several layers of tape, opened the box flaps and pulled out an object that had been laboriously wadded up inside roughly 2,000 square feet of white paper. She unwrapped it, layer by layer, until finally she got to the object that had been so carefully protected a coffee mug. With coffee still in it. If you're wondering why we packed a mug with coffee in it, the answer is, we are not that stupid. We are MUCH stupider than that. What we did was PAY SOMEBODY to do this. I am of course referring to moving professionals. They're all trained at a special school. Here's a sample question from the final exam: You are packing up a customer's possessions, and you find a human body with multiple stab wounds. You should: a. Call an ambulance. women map illiterate?) DAD: Which way now, Linda? MOM: I don't know. DAD: God it Linda! Read the map! Dad's face is getting redder and Tedder. MOM: You're driving! DAD: Well I certainly can't drive and read the map at the same time can I?! Dad is fuming by this time, shouting at the top of his lungs. MOM: I think you just better stop somewhere and ask for directions! We go through this conversation over and over and over and over Andi and I are pretty prepared at vacation entertainment. Besides playing cards and hangman, we like to signal semi drivers to toot their horns, and we read other cars' license plates and make words or sentences out of them. (Bumper Stumpers on the USA channel.) Driving in Canada is fun too where everything is in the metric system. We see a sign that says the speed limit is 100 km. "What's 100 km in miles, Dad?" I love toll booths. I like reading all the weird-named cities on the ticket and how much they "cost." Did you ever notice that the ride home takes half as much time as the ride there? Eventualiy we get to the hoteVinote,l. I s wondered wit ni Making a new house a home b. Notify the police. c. Wad it up in white paper and stuff it in a box. The correct answer is "c". Professional movers wad EVERYTHING in white paper. If, in 1990, George Bush had sent in professional movers to resolve the Kuwait problem, today the entire Iraqi military force, tanks and all, would be individually wadded up inside several million cardboard boxes strewn all over the desert, each box labeled with only the word "IRAQ". (Or possibly "BETH".) It would take Saddam Hussein DECADES to unpack his army. ("Let's see what's in this box ... more corporals! Where the HECK did they put the enlisted men?") That's pretty much our situation. We're in a new, extremely box-intensive house. We moved because our old house got whomped by Hurricane Andrew. We thought about fixing it up, but then we got some estimates from contactors: CONTRACTOR: OK, you see this? US: What? CONTRACTOR: Where the tree landed on this truss. Opinion difference was between a hotel and a motel. A motel (MOTOR plus HOTEL) has rooms that open directly to the parking area. Rooms in a hotel are enclosed within a building. Hotels are usually bigger, nicer, more comfortable, and of course, more expensive. Motels aren't bad, I just like the elevators in hotels and the fact that you can run up and down the halls, creating all kinds of commotion and wake everyone. I really hate motels that have two stories because you have to drag all your luggage that weighs 29 million pounds up a stairwell that isn't enclosed, and it's usually raining cats and dogs. (Or is that dogs and cats? Which is politically correct?) My mom is so frantic in a hotellmotel. She has a fear' of the floors and we always have to wear shoes whenever we walk around on the carpet because "you don't know what kinds of bugs have been crawling around." I usually take those thongs that FLIP-FLOP-FLIP FLOP when you wear them. I love all the "goodies" that hotels have: petite bottles of shampoo and conditioner, soapies, official hotel pens and paper. My sister and I always fight over the stationery. Requesting extra towels is aiwilya fun. The maid brings you less than you began with, or she brings enough