Thursday, September 3, 2009

Canadian Chronicles 2009: One Good Idea Is All It Takes

It all began, like so many things do, over a glass of wine. My good friend, Paula, and I were wanting for a little adventure in our stay-at-home-mom lives. We only had one glass of wine. If we had two glasses, we might have come to the realization that a girls trip should not include "girls" under the age of 10.

But, as far as we knew, we were planning the getaway of a lifetime. We decided to hit the family Canadian cottage early, before all of the summer guests arrived. We plotted quiet nights, lazy mornings and lots of girl time. Kayaking, frolicking in the water and delicious food danced like visions of sugar plums in our heads.

Reality hit hard and fast. The bickering began on the plane. You might have guessed it, the quarrel was over the window seat.

The window seat has long lost its appeal for me. I now prefer the quick and easy exit of the aisle seat. I love not having to lope over strangers two or three times in a flight to stretch my legs and make a run for the bathroom. This should be why a person might take yoga, so they can bend themselves like a pretzel over the legs, bags, reclined seats and trays between themselves and freedom.

However, when you are seven, the window seat holds the magic of the fluffy clouds and the people and places as tiny as ants. The world looks nice and tidy when you are gliding over the geometry that bisects and trisects the landscape. The most mighty of reasons the window seat rules you may ask? When you have it, no one else does.

This theme popped again and again throughout the trip. Possession is 9/10ths of the law, and when someone else has something, that makes it all the more important that you have it, too. When you don't have it, and you are a girl under a certain age, the whining can turn an 8 hour trip into at least 16 hours.

When we got off the plane and got the rental car, the girls started to fight about who had to sit in the middle seat. Paula and I looked at the mountain of bags--we were going to have to work a small miracle to fit them in the car. Our eyes sagged with fatigue, and the whining, the whining, the whining, kept right on going.

We still had a two hour drive and the task of picking up a kayak and strapping it to the roof. Girls getaway? Are we there yet?


7 comments:

Jennifer said...

Oh no. I'm already tired. ;-) LOL!

Krystyn @ Really, Are You Serious? said...

Wow! You are certainly a braver soul than I!

Unknown said...

Oh my! Hopefully there will be some fun once the travel is done... hopefully! lol!

Unknown said...

PS... I found you through MBC and I'm now a follower!

Unknown said...

PS... I found you through MBC and I'm now a follower!

Lynda said...

And you chucked one of the bags to make room in the car for that case of wine you hopefully shipped?

Deb said...

@Jennifer: me, too! And that was vacation?

@Krystyn: I don't know if it's brave or just plain stupid? Of course, there are a lot of good memories and Paula and I just laughed and laughed about this today. Over wine, of course.

@AMH615: There is fun to come :) Welcome and thanks for the follow.

@Lynda: Ahhhhhh, you know us too well. We chose wine over organic groceries, and that says an awful lot considering...