My most memorable vacation… I’m going to give you two.
One from my youth, and one from my mom era.
(Though the trips to Fright Fest Great America when kiddo was growing up were fun, too, and our solo visit to The Dells… SO many great memories).
****Be forewarned… this post takes some wild turns.***
First: my trip to England and France. 16, I was. High school-sponsored trip, with our English teacher, which was memorable for a whole host of reasons, savory and otherwise. I’ll share a couple things.
I left my passport behind at the hotel by mistake one day, much to my teacher’s chagrin. She didn’t want the WHOLE busload of us to have to go back, so she asked if I could pretend to be a French student, to get into the Louvre. I showed her I knew how to say, “I’m a French student,” in proper French, accent and all, as best I could manage.
(Not my photo, but this part of the post needed some visuals, to break things up a little)
They believed me at the ticket booth, without a moment’s hesitation, but she cautioned me not to follow their group too closely because she thought they would suspect something was funny, if I did?! So I tried to follow from a distance, and was temporarily separated from them. Which was bound to happen.
SOMEHOW I found my way back, or we reconnected.
The Mona Lisa is a lot smaller than I expected, and the surface of the paint is riddled with cracks. You’d never know that without seeing it in person. None of the reproductions capture its age.
(From Pexels… did they have these banners up when I was there? Not sure. But hey…)
Also, we visited Notre-Dame. This would have been before the fire and rebuilding. Long before. I don’t have a clear visual memory of each stained glass window and such, but I do recall that there was a mass going on as we entered.
Our teacher asked me if I could understand the priest, and I could. He was reading the Creation story out of the Bible. Even back then, I was fairly disenchanted by Christianity, for reasons of my own, but I was a little disappointed we didn’t stay longer. It was a treat being able to translate the words for myself, as he read.
Pexels pic, but beautiful
One of my favorite parts of the trip to England was venturing into the country to see Stonehenge. There’s a magnetic pull toward the center of the innermost ring, which we were able to test and feel, by use of hangers.
The trip was so long ago, all my photos were physical prints, and likely mostly lost at this point… and I was in a weird headspace and took photos of graffiti and such… but there was one pic I took of a vintage bicycle propped against a wall, that I found rather lovely, even later. BUT… another Pexels find.
At some point on the trip, we did a “secret Santa” kind of thing. I got a keychain with one of the famous Stonehenge arches on it, solid, honking pewter or something. Don’t have it anymore, because I turned it into a necklace, and gave it to a guy who had always wanted to see the site.
Gifting is one of my favorite ways to express love.
If you recall my post about Justin, who’d used the street name “London,” I gave him a swanky-looking disposable lighter I’d picked up on the same vacation, with “London” on it, in cool script.
There was also the Australian with the torn irises who sold me a bracelet in the London Underground. Black leather braid with a bit of silver chain threaded through. I’d said I liked so many of them but wasn’t sure which one to buy.
“What kind of music do you like?” he’d asked.
I showed him the Ministry CD I had just bought, even though we were strongly advised not to buy anything we could just as easily get at home. My money, I thought. Who cares? Exchange rate? So what?
His jaw dropped. Maybe I didn’t look like a Ministry fan? I did have black hair at that point, as I do now, but might not have been dressed the part. That’s when he showed me the bracelet I ultimately bought. I think he was impressed with my taste. But then, he was also just trying to sell product, so who knows? He cheekily said he charged extra to the Brits, and we bonded over that.
I also learned from him a lesson I would carry into my grad school experience in American Ethnic Literature. No one outside of the United States really cares much where your ancestors came from, unless perhaps you’re a native to the United States. Otherwise, you’re just plain ol’ vanilla American.
I told him I was Irish, for whatever reason, and MUCH confusion ensued.
But as I would later tell my American Ethnic Literature professor in an aside after class, our family seems to have preserved its roots with more than just “food-ways:” storytelling traditions, the socializing at wakes and funerals, keeping a sharp eye on the obituaries, honoring even those individuals with only tentative connections to the family, and the superstitious use of holy water or holy oil on the walls during storms, or on family members’ throats during illness. Also, both their houses were blessed.
Back to London:
Our teacher was also frustrated with me for stopping to shop the bracelet wares, when we were trying to get from Point A to Point B. But how many times are you going to meet an Aussie whose pupils seem to flow like lava lamps? And in the middle of London, of all places?
Though really, London and Paris had people from ALL over. I saw a guy in France who looked exactly like my dad… perhaps not surprising, since we were near the Belgium border, and there is a lot of Belgian on his side of the family.
The runny pupils thing…It’s a medical condition. I have since met exactly ONE other person who had it, while my friends and I were exploring Chicago, and they explained it a little.
There was a very old inn we stayed at in England, I think after the Stonehenge visit, with “Lion” something or other in the name. Old enough that it had a lift instead of an elevator.
Everyone else the next morning complained of eerie noises in the night and not being able to sleep. But I got the first good sleep I’d had the entire trip, and thought at one point I sensed the spirit of my departed maternal grandmother. If you believe if that sort of thing?
I also entreated whatever higher power might be listening to allow me one night of rest on the other side of the veil, believing sleeping in the spirit realm might rejuvenate me.
Who knows what really happened that night? Maybe it was all power of suggestion, or a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I felt SO much better in the morning.
Leaving by bus, a stolen jar of jam fell out of an overhead bag and hit one of the chaperones on the head. I laughed and said it was “karma.” Maybe not very nice of me. But who steals jam from a hotel? Like an honest to goddess glass jar, not the individual packets they leave out on tables here.
Have I talked about all of that in another post? Gosh, I hope not. I wrote about the trip in memoirs, I think, both in something I published on Amazon, and in shorter form, for a piece I submitted in grad school. Not sure if it’s come up here. I know the WordPress prompts are recycled.
More recently, back in July of 2023 (and HERE is where the photo comes in), my mom and I visited kiddo and her boyfriend, and his family, in Oklahoma and Texas.
I had a lot of fun capturing “Mothman sightings” with my Baby Mothman keychain, at the various locations we checked out. Yes, I have photos of us with kiddo, the boyfriend, and the family. But those feel more private. And, looking back, I was SO heavy at that point. The photos are a little hard to look at. Not skinny now, but getting healthier every day, impulse-fast-food or not.
My mom was a great sport about keeping everyone well fed during the trip. I certainly paid for my fair share of things, as well, blowing an entire paycheck on the visit, then scrambling to pay bills once we got back, even with my PTO. But she took us out to eat A LOT.
She was a little dismayed about having rented a house versus getting a hotel room, since we didn’t have a convenient lobby restaurant, and hadn’t rented a car. Once we got groceries, and resolved that kiddo and boyfriend would meet us earlier in the day so we wouldn’t be stuck waiting, she was much happier.
I still feel like it was maybe the right call, because the hotels in the price range we were looking for didn’t have very good reviews. And with a house, there wasn’t noise coming through the walls.
Cute little two-bedroom place, with a huge TV, ready for me to plug in all my streaming passwords, nice backyard, etc. If we ever go back, and they’re still in Norman, I’d look for it again. They said they’d be happy to have us back!
Breaux Bridge Sirloin from SaltGrass, which Baby Mothman and I shared.
Even better than all the GREAT food (and there was an awful LOT of that), we met her boyfriend’s brothers, and his step-brother, his mother and father, and both his step-parents.
Everyone was so welcoming.
His dad treated us to a Dim Sum brunch, where he personally knew the owner or something and got us a table pretty fast in spite of massive lines. The Chrysanthemum Tea was so good! Really, all of it was amazing.
Her boyfriend’s mom and I really hit it off. She seemed like she’d make such a great friend. I was sad to have to leave their ranch. We swam in their pool the one day, then came back again, when I pointed out we hadn’t taken any photos!
She and I have since had some chats about how hard it is to part ways with your children, and she told me Allura had no way to really understand how painful it was for me, to have her move so far away, to hardly ever see her. That she missed me, but ultimately, she was happy. Difficult to hear, but maybe healthy, too.
Kiddo LOVES visiting their ranch, because they have horses, who we also got to meet, and offer treats to. She’s a horse-girl. Has been since she was little.
Horses and snakes/lizards.
Her favorite animal at the zoo since she was old enough to talk but not to correctly pronounce “boa,” was the constrictor she called “Booyah.” When the herpetology society visited the zoo and she got to pet them and hold them, she was over the moon!
She’d wanted to get a snake for the apartment, but I had said I wasn’t comfortable if it were anything that might one day grow large enough to need to eat rodents, since we had owned mice as pets. Fast lil things, they are! Friends, not food.
But then eventually, we graduated to the guinea pig brothers, Sam and Dean, and after them, the cats, first Unity, then Happy.
Back to the trip to Oklahoma, and the drive to Texas, from there…
Mainly, it was great to see the town where she lives. Her favorite haunts.
Meet the people who have come to love her.
I do regret I didn’t try harder to scrape together money to come see them in Texas, before they moved to Oklahoma. We drove to the Dallas area to meet her boyfriend’s dad and so on, and stayed overnight there, at their house. But it would have been good to see both apartments, and experience for myself the full world of her life.
I’d like to go back, to see her cat again, too, since no one knows for sure how long he has (even if the prognosis seems a bit more optimistic now). And to visit the fam.
I’m not sure if my mom has another trip in her, as much as she said she’d like to take my cousin up on his offer to fly us out to see him and his family in California, but that she’d told him I probably couldn’t get out of work.
When I told her it would be fine, I would just have to request off, she seemed a little crestfallen. So maybe that was just her excuse so she wouldn’t have to tell him no, thank you.
She’s also mentioned wanting to see Ireland while she’s still with us, and I offered to go with there, too. Even if I would need a seat belt extender still, Delta offers them free, and Delta does, indeed, fly there. Once I said that, all discussion of Ireland stopped.
Maybe given that she’s had multiple recent TIA’s, travel wouldn’t be so smart, regardless. All those conversations happened before our frantic trips to the ER.
When we flew into Oklahoma, I had initially planned on going alone, but I guess it’s just as well I didn’t. It helped having someone else to cover some of the expenses, and I think the rest of her boyfriend’s family really enjoyed meeting both of us, not just me. It’s a shame my dad couldn’t have come with, also; he had work obligations at the time, and someone had to stay home to look after the cats.
He has at least met my daughter’s boyfriend. They both flew up for one of my birthdays. It was a lot of fun showing him some cool touristy things around here, like the peninsula. And House on the Rock. We pressed a lot of pennies. And we had a nice family-only birthday shindig for me. My mom cheated at Pin the Tail on the Donkey.
Since my daughter had left her Big Tex cup topper at home, which we had used for funny “action shots” around town the first time she came up (inspiring my Mothman photo ideas), her boyfriend gamely volunteered to pose for action shots. Some of those are utterly hilarious.
Gosh, I miss her.
I told some of my coworkers today that she’d be coming up this fall and visiting for Halloween, that I would swing us by the store at some point. “Not sure who’ll be working when we get here, but I will bring her in for a visit.”
One of them asked how long it had been since I last saw her. “Last June,” I said, and she replied, “Aw, and that’s too long.” I agreed. But she said it was for sure good news, and that she was really happy to hear about it. Her joy on my behalf was so pure and so sincere.
A new hire of ours asked how old kiddo was. Almost 25. Then, she made my night telling me I didn’t look old enough to have a 25 year old. I volunteered my age, and she was shocked. “You don’t look it,” she said. I laughed. “I try not to.”
Nothing wrong with getting older, as it SURE as hell beats the alternative. But I will be holding onto my vanity tooth and nail, along the way, surrendering slowly if at all. I suppose it’s a fallacy of our culture that only youth is beautiful, but it’s a hard one to root out of your mind. For me, anyway, as it relates to my self-esteem.
I think about getting older maybe more often than I should, imagining what my final moments will be like, hoping somehow kiddo will be able to be by my side. I can’t imagine EVER saying goodbye, even though I know I don’t really have a voice in that. It’s amazing how I can know that while simultaneously struggling with mental health issues, and feeling some days like life is too long to possibly endure.
I guess the best you can hope for is setting your kid(s) up for success. I suppose I should look into life insurance again, and so on. There’s the practical side of things to consider, as well.
We’ve both been through quite a bit, together and apart, but she’s a very kind-hearted soul. She works hard and leads with patience and empathy. She’s an endless source of inspiration for me, as I work on myself, in so many ways seemingly the better person of the two of us.
I wish she’d give herself more time for, or devote more energy to, her own creativity, but maybe she’s putting in so much in the other areas of her life that she just can’t. She’s quite the talented artist, in her own right.
With her fibromyalgia, I think her full-time job and duties at home have her pretty well tapped out. I will always want more for her, but her own vision of the life she wants to lead, and what’s worth sacrificing for, come first.
Appreciate your kids every chance you get, if you have any, even though parenting is INCREDIBLY hard, especially if you’re doing it without a partner. And (as I have to remind myself), bear in mind the difficulties of your own parents, and try to be understanding with them, if you can, while still protecting your own boundaries and peace of mind.
Moving on to things not so heavy… let’s close out the post with some more fun photos.
Here’s Mothman at Mod Pizza, and some of the treats we had there.
Lastly, a selfie I snuck while we were at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.
I saw this bit of abstract fun and thought it would make a great backdrop. Even took a moment to reapply my lip gloss first. LOL.
I think we stressed my mom some, wanting to get in one last bit of sightseeing before heading to the airport, but it was right in the city. We had plenty of time, and still ended up waiting quite a while to board.
It was a fun museum to explore! I got a lot of great photos there. I think most of them are hiding deep within my Facebook, and these, I was able to more readily borrow from my Instagram. You’ll just have to take my word for it, that the art was VERY impressive. If you’re ever in Oklahoma City, I highly recommend checking it out!
Peace!
All the Bright and Sparkly Things 
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