Observations from the vacation

I noticed a few things while on vacation with my family this week.


1. Everyone in my family finds sunburned skin on someone else irresistible. My brothers spent a common sense free day at the beach and came back very sunburned. They spent the rest of the week touching one another on their respective sunburned necks and arms and backs whenever the other wasn't looking.


2. My mother gets some sort of injury every time she goes on vacation. This trip was no exception. She rode on a Seg-way (it's a one manned vehicle you stand on) and managed to crash into a curb and skinned her knee. This was an exceptionally mild injury for her.


3. I have an easily turned stomach when it comes to certain food and my family knows this. Chicken skin is a substance I find revolting. I may be the only southerner with this affliction. I NEVER eat that slimy, disgusting substance. Every time we passed the Kentucky Fried Chicken with the "All You Can Eat" banner, Big Daddy Awesome and my brothers would ask me if I'd like to go in for some deep fried chicken skin. And then I would involuntarily retch.


4. There are a large number of women who feel the need to wear a bikini at the beach. The vast majority of them should not be wearing said bikinis.


5. Big Daddy Awesome was recently diagnosed with a shell fish allergy. By me. He did not appreciate being threatened with an Epi-pen stabbing to his thigh if his airway swelled shut, should he indulge in any shell fish. (What did he think would happen if he married a nurse?)


6. The most fascinating thing my children did was ride the shuttle bus in Colonial Williamsburg. They begged to get to ride the bus every day. Why couldn't they find anything else fascinating?


7. A two hour dinner at a period restaurant with entertainment by costumed interpreters is perfectly acceptable. An hour and a half at a breakfast joint is completely unacceptable and yet the norm. Do they really think I want to bask in the ambiance of their tacky fake plants and decades old plastic chairs?


8. The tunnels going under the river coming out of Norfolk have a strobe-like effect and make me dizzy. How do more wrecks not happen there? Why can't they have a single bridge that doesn't go under the water?


9. In Texas, streams are a maximum of 10 feet wide. In Virginia, streams are a minimum of 100 feet wide and there's probably a minimum depth of 15 feet. Those are called rivers in Texas.


10. My family seems to be the source of weather extremes when we travel. Virginia had record setting temperatures at least 3 days while we were there.



All in all, it was a fun vacation.