…and the bullet points just keep on rolling!

• In addition to the ticket arcade, we found something else to spend obscene amounts of money on: dinner.

• The resort is peppered with advertisements down every hallway. Quite a few of them were for one of the in-house restaurants, Karl's Steak House. There are only so many times I can see those ads before I start thinking that food is the most delicious looking food in the history of the world.

• Karl's Steak House doesn't look like a terribly upscale place, but they sure as fuck are priced like one. The really cheap steaks were over $30 dollars and prices trended up over $100. For a steak. I know these prices aren't unheard of, but this is just not what we were expecting.

• The Bunny ordered… uh, pasta I think (shut up, it's been two weeks), The Chicken ordered… uh, something else and I ordered the Giant Mashed Potatoes.

• I highly recommend those potatoes. It's a big-ass mound of home made potatoes roughly the size of my head (literally), laced with butter and smothered in sour cream, thick cut bacon chunks and melted cheddar. Holy fuck, was it good. And filling. I ate less than half of it, then ate more for breakfast the next day and still had leftovers go to waste.

• Another bright spot on the restaurant experience was the wine list. The crown jewel of their list was an 18 liter bottle of cabernet sauvignon. 18 liters. I wanted it so badly, but not badly enough to pay $1300 for it. That price does not include a team of Sherpas to lug it around for you.

• At first I wanted the ginormous bottle of wine for myself, but Bunny had a much better idea — Christmas gift for my boss's wife and office manager Bird, a real wine enthusiast. Bunny's idea was to give her that bottle and a crazy straw and watch her go.

• After squeaking out of the restaurant with our nest egg intact (current nest egg balance: $8.12, two old buttons, one dull washer that looks like a dime), we returned to our condo for one of my favorite parts of any hotel stay: real cable television.

• After a very long drought, we now have cable TV at home again. But we have a super cheap package, which we only ordered because it was free at first. We get eight or nine channels, and none of them are terribly exciting.

• Whenever we're at a hotel, I'd like nothing more than to kick back with my feet up and the History Channel on continuously. I loves me some History. I watched a show on chocolate production, another on the machines of execution, another on the underworld beneath Paris (huge, cavernous rooms filled with bones) and the most unexpectedly cool show ever… "Ice Road Truckers."

• I've known for quite some time that Canada has a huge diamond mine up north somewhere. I had no idea how far north it was. The mine operates year round, and has it's own airstrip for deliveries of fresh food, medicine and emergency flights out. Very heavy equipment can't be flown in, it has to be driven in. The catch is that there's no road.

• The "road" from Yellowknife to the mine is hundreds of kilometers long and only 20% of it is overland. The rest is over water. The ice is only thick enough for heavy trucks for about eight or ten weeks a year. That's the premise of the show: reality TV about truckers making a mad dash over sheet ice in near-arctic conditions and complete isolation to get a year's worth of heavy equipment to the mine in two months. The show is oddly captivating.

• Later on, my brother-in-law and I decided on some hops- and barley-based lubrication to smooth over the stresses of howling children in close quarters. Which I'm totally exaggerating. There was very little howling, the quarters weren't that close, and we weren't that much in need. But, hey… it's beer!

• The beers were mostly uneventful. The most noteworthy thing was our tentative plan to move the next night's required drinking (because the drinking is required, believe me) to… the boobie bar!

• Tourist Trap has an abundance of gentlemen's establishments, which makes sense given the general "give me all your fucking money" motif established by the rest of the community. The only thing lacking is casinos. Oh, wait… the Trap has those too.

 
Tune in next time for even less inspiring events! (The excitement keeps building, I know!)

So! I've put it off long enough. It's time to write about my super spiffy vacation. For the occasion I have revived my long-dead Vacanigans category. I meant to do this with my vacation last year, but the abortive Vacanigans II never made it further than a few half-assed drafts. The problem with that was mostly ambition. I wanted to write posts that were a sequel to my original series in more than just name. But my posting style has changed quite a bit since then. By which I mean I'm too lazy for long-winded play-by-play accounts of mundane events I try to make funny.

Instead, I'm going bullet points. I'd have to be pretty pathetic to be too lazy for bullet points. Not that I couldn't be that lazy. I'm sure I have that potential.

• The first day of Vacation, Saturday, was a whole lot of nothing. I don't even remember what we did, so I now assume we did nothing. Literally. We probably say around like robots waiting for someone to activate us.

• Sunday morning we loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly. Hills, that is. Swimmin' pools, movie stars. Actually, we loaded up Bunny's mother's minivan for our trip to at family water park resort in Tourist Trap.

• Tourist Trap is the biggest tourist trap in the mid-west (hence the name). Everything there is priced accordingly.

• I'm still not completely certain what is a "trap." I think "traps" is an old Chippewa word meaning "empty your wallet, white man."

• We made pretty good time to the family water park resort, which ended up biting us in the ass a little bit. Had we been much slower, we would not have been stranded at the resort for several hours.

• At this resort, we were sharing a suite with Bunny's mother-in-law, Bunny's sister and her husband, their three kids and one friend. So that's 206 people for that one suite.

• I drove the minivan filled with luggage. My brother-in-law drove the minivan filled with people. I definitely got the better deal.

• We did not leave home at the same time, and so didn't arrive at even close to the same time. By the time we hit the resort, they'd arrived, tried unsuccessfully to check in (too early) and wandered off to go shopping. Sweet! Unable to much else, Bunny, The Chicken and I wandered around for two hours until everyone arrived for check in.

• It was during that "exploring every space twice" wandering that I found the gift shop with my magical penguin pals.

• At check in, we learned that for some reason or another, we'd been upgraded to a condominium for free. Nice! You'll get no complaints from us.

• As soon as we had keys, we dashed off to our condo where I immediately parked my suitcase on the king size bed in the nice bedroom. 'cuz if my suitcase is on it first, it's mine. That's a rule, right?

• After toting eight million suitcases up to our place, we were finally ready to hit the water park.

• The water park was firmly… eh. I guess that sort of thing just ain't my bag, baby. My favorite part, in fact the only part I really enjoyed at all, is the faux river, where you plop your ass in an inner tube and float in circles. I'm all about the lazy floating. That feels like vacation.

• This particular river had an Aztec theme. The Aztecs are still trying to punish European types like me. I know this because around the entire course of the river, everything that shoots water at passersby (floatersby?) hit me in the balls at least once. This surely must be Titicaca's Revenge.

• I don't what Titicaca is/was. However, I do know that Titicaca is the greatest name ever, despite the unpleasant Cleveland steamer associations.

• Another nice thing about the water park was the wide variety of soccer moms available. Every color, age, size and shape was represented. Even if your tastes trend toward the more exotic, like say, southeast Asian Muslim women, you'd still have something to oogle.

• That last one? I can't confirm that. Somebody else told me that. I wouldn't know because I was too busy looking at Bunny only.

• Ok, I did look at one other woman: the chick that looked just like Deputy Trudy Wiegel.

• The water slides were plentiful and, uh… watery… and slide-like. Really, they're water slides. I'm sure you can picture this without me.

• One slide is worth mentioning: the one with the huge, almost vertical drop. Chicken was completely fearless about all of the water slides, including that one.

• After seventeen hours at the water park, we were ready to go do something else, like spend $100 in the ticket arcade while failing to earn enough tickets to buy the top-end prizes.

 
Look forward to more uninspiring details in a future post! (Do I know how to sell a sequel, or what?)