Tuesday, October 18, 2005

A couple of years ago, the family and I decided to take a little trip to the most prohibitively expensive happiest place on earth. So we took out a second mortgage on the house and drove out to lovely Anahiem, California and got a hotel room.

The next morning, after a standard continental breakfast in the hotel lobby, we caught the shuttle over to Disneyland in order to be at the gates when they opened*. We got inside the park, went on a few rides, wandered through a few stores, purchased some insanely expensive snack food, took pictures of the munchkin with teenagers in trademarked fuzzy costumes and were generally having a lovely time in the beautiful Southern California weather.

Sometime in the early afternoon, we happened past the Autopia ride and decided that the line didn't look too terribly long** so we hopped in line. Half an hour later we finally got up to the actual vehicles, and my kid and husband hopped in the first one and I got into the car directly behind them. We zoomed around the little track that probably looked cool and futuristic in 1952 when it was built*** and soon found ourselves at the end of the ride.

Some teenager in a jumpsuit that looked like something out of the original "Herbie" movie jumps on the side of my car and guides me up**** to the exit. As I'm starting to step out of the little car, I hear a soft splat. I turn around to see about 4 and a half cups of bird crap*****, most of which landed on the empty car seat, but a large portion of which landed on the sleeve of my shirt.

The jumpsuited youth just kind of stared, slack jawed before finally getting some papertowels to clean the seat of the car (yeah, thanks for that) and I sort of laughed (because, really, what else can you do in that situation?) - but that's kind of how I'm feeling today - and I don't even really know what that means.


* For anyone who's ever been there knows that this is the only way to get on the really good rides (like Pirates of the Carribean) without waiting in line for 17 hours

** which turned out to be wrong, because of that wily Walt Disney and his penchant for making lines of 14 million tourists look deceptively short

*** just a guess, I really have no idea when it was built, if you'd like to Google it yourself, go right on ahead, it is, after all, a free internet

**** because, you know, I'm a woman driver, so I can't be trusted on my own

***** seriously, it was such a large amount of bird crap that it was either a collective effort from a flock of pigeons, or it was a pteradactyl

Labels: adventures in shitty parenting