travel

Feeling Lucky

A couple weeks ago we were tasked with dog sitting Shirley’s sister’s dog Lucky. Shirley’s sister and husband are vegetarians. We made BLT’s for dinner one night and gave Lucky some bacon, it was the closest thing to watching someone smoke crack for the first time you could experience without watching someone smoke crack for the first time. (their daughter accidentally had a corn dog at school once and she can’t stop talking about corn dogs) We probably ruined Lucky by giving him a taste of the forbidden. Unlike other people’s kids, I actually like most dogs, but Lucky is incredibly annoying, he’s some kind of doodle and I’m not sure who decided to combine every possible dog breed with poodles but it was a terrible idea. On top of barking at all hours of the night for no reason and waking me up, Lucky also has a perpetual red rocket, his scheeth isn’t long enough to contain his penis, it’s pretty gross, and likely a product of breeding another breed with a poodle. Along the lines of my wife’s side of the family, my mother in law is really good at sabotaging weekends or vacations with really dumb ideas. Earlier this summer she decided to rent her child hood home that is now a VRBO. It’s in Fremont which is enough to indicate it was a terrible idea, but on top of that, it’s also on a glorified swamp and there is very little to do there. Of course, everyone claims it was a great time, but I know better.

Labor Day weekend is usually the last real weekend to enjoy Green Lake but Shirley’s mom decided to book hotel rooms in Whitehall. Instead of making a real big deal about going up there (I wasn’t even consulted about it) I put up a minor fuss and ended up taking our boat up there to bring out to Lake Michigan. It ended up being an ok day but the Thursday night before Labor Day weekend my mother in law texted wondering what we were doing Friday night. ESPN has prognostications as games go on as to the percentage likelihood that a particular team will win the game as it is being played. I wish there was an app that did the same thing for sex. In the morning when I wake up the percentage around 3% and stays there until Shirley gets home from work and then likely dips to around 1%. Taking away my hope by having it go to 0 would actually be a good thing because hope is a dangerous thing. That being said, when I lost my shit about Shirley’s mom not only hijacking Sunday and Monday of Labor Day weekend, but also Friday night, the app would have dipped below zero. I keep trying to tell my wife that spending that much time with your family isn’t normal, but because she spends so much time with her family she doesn’t really have an unbiased third party to give her some perspective.

As far as sex goes, on Sunday morning I came back from Starbucks somewhat ready for business time but began talking to Shirley about how depressing it is that summer just flew by once again. I went into discussing when we should take the boat, boat lift, and walk out docks out of the water. All of the talk caused a mild case of ED, which had never happened to me before. It was quite emasculating but not as nearly as emasculating as someone who lets their wife drive. I see men in the passenger seat with their wife at the wheel and can’t help but think “that guy is a giant pussy” (My vegetarian brother in law lets his wife drive all the time). I don’t consider myself a misogynist unless the topic of discussion is the WNBA, but the old fashioned part of me believes that men should be driving their families around unless they are either drunk or dead.

Speaking of driving, Aiden is now in the process of obtaining his learner’s permit. He only has one more class to take and has done all of his driving. I’m confident that after about ten hours behind the wheel he will be a more competent driver than Shirley. I have noticed that there are now bumper stickers that can be placed on a vehicle warning other driver’s that you have a student driver at the wheel. I am tempted to get one of these after Aiden is done acquiring his driving hours so I can drive like an idiot and not have people get mad at me. It’s similar to when you see someone with a handicap license plate and they drive as if they have no business being on the road, you see the handicap emblem on their license plate and instead of anger you question the decision of the Secretary of State to allow handicap people to operate a motor vehicle, their fucking handicap, shouldn’t that preclude them from driving a car? (I do realize there are a portion of fat fucks who aren’t really handicap but get handicap plates to they park their fat asses closer to the entrance of McDonalds, and they shouldn’t be driving either, these are the same people who use a mart cart to grocery shopping)

Get to the Point

In late April or early May my kids began to hound me about going to Cedar Point. I have fond memories of Cedar Point and after having gone there again, have no idea why. After over a month of harassment I finally caved and committed to a date to go and it morphed into an overnight trip where they each took a friend. This worked out because Shirley and I were able to justify our own room, now that my kids are older it’s super weird sleeping in the same room with everyone, which led to some sexy time before our second day in the park. Our plan was to leave around 1 on Tuesday and spend an evening in the park as well as the following day. Prior to leaving I stopped by the river to ski. I stated we would be leaving around 1 because I knew I would want to ski before we left. Aiden texted me around 11:30 informing me he was ready to go. I did not respond. Shirley texted me while I was skiing and I texted her when I was done that I would be home in 5 minutes. Initially, my gut told me to put my suit back on so that they would think I had been working. I didn’t and as I drove down the road right by our house I decided to pull over and put it on because I had to do a Zoom court hearing from the car on the way to Cedar Point. When I arrived home Shirley asked why I put my suit back on since I had just been at the river. I forgot that she can track where I am through the find my friends app, fortunately she rarely does this because she is typically too busy to keep tabs on me, and for the most part she doesn’t really care what I am up to.

The ride to cedar point was fairly uneventful and I was grateful that the Zoom sentencing I had kept me from noticing how Shirley was driving. I typically don’t ride with her so it is terrifying when I do. After my zoom was done I took over and we made it unscathed. That evening Shirley and I rode the gatekeeper, Ragnorok (sp?), and Millennium Force. I felt like I was going to have a stroke on all of them. Shirley and I ate in the park and also had a couple beers, each round for the two of us was roughly $40, seems like they would make a larger profit by lowering the price and having people buy more, with the added benefit of having more drunk people riding roller coasters, what could go wrong? However, the kids were too enveloped in riding as many coasters as possible so they did not eat. On the way out I was reminded that one of the kids (obviously not mine) was Vegan and that we needed to go to Burger King for an impossible burger. I should have made the kid eat some gravel in the parking lot so that we didn’t have to make multiple stops. My kids were insisting on Raising Canes because they think it’s amazing even though it’s just as over rated in my book, as Chick-Fil-A. We managed to talk all the kids into Burger King and then headed back to the hotel. Vegans are like no one else in America, everyone I know devotes most of their consciousness to thinking about food. But when the food you eat sucks, you don’t look forward to it, and you don’t think about it all that often. Probably similar with most women as to why they don’t seem to really be all that in to sex. My wife’s family typically will discuss lunch plans about 3 minutes after breakfast is concluded and after lunch they are typically on to dinner ideas before I can even start my afternoon nap.

Day 2 we were going to go out for pancakes but pancakes apparently aren’t vegan friendly either. Shirley wanted to create this magical memory of going out for pancakes before we went into the park and she also thought that this was going to be some magical family trip. I told her if she had planned on hanging out with the kids for more than five minutes on this trip she shouldn’t have allowed them to invite friends. We opted for McDonalds and the Vegan kid had a hash brown and may have licked some dust off the floor for additional sustenance. All of the kids were given fast passes and they were off. Shirley and I headed to the back of the park to ride steel vengeance only to discover it was temporarily out of commission. We decided to just wait for it to start back up and after an hour and a half our decision paid off. We jumped back in line to ride it again and after that we noticed that the skies looked ominous. The kids were not answering their phones, turns out their phones were in lockers as they waited to ride top thrill dragster 2. Shirley ended up going into the top thrill line to retrieve them just before the flood gates opened so we left the park to get lunch. Jersey Mikes was thought to be a suitable vegan option since they have a sub that is called a vegan sub but it was a no go. So, realizing there was a chipotle across the street after Shirley and I had put our orders in, Shirley did a mobile order for the vegan kid. Our kids ended up getting Raising Kanes right before we headed back to the park. The kids lucked out and rode Top Thrill 2 twice along with a few other rides. Shirley was on the fence about TT2 but I talked her into it and we went to get in line only to discover that the ride, and all other rides, were closed due to weather. Apparently, if there is a lightning strike within five miles they shut everything down and keep it closed for a half hour and if there is another strike the clock starts all over.

As we were leaving the park there was a set up similar to the 3 point contest in the all star game. It was $12 to try and get in the record books (high score according to the guy was 18 out of a possible 20). I envisioned myself getting at least 19 but didn’t account for the jankity rim, shitty balls, and pressure of the 6 spectators watching me (my wife, two kids, their friends, and the guy running the game). I hit a couple corner 3’s to start only to score 5 points. A crew of guys rolled up after I got done with my first round and they easily could have had some type of affiliation with OPEC, one of them, wearing an Aaron Donald jersey, managed to hit the back board on corner 3’s not once, but twice, I wanted to say to the guy, it’s not as easy as I make it look, but I kept my mouth shut and was going to let my next round speak for itself, but my next round was equally as abysmal as my first, and I notched another 5 points. I was tempted to go for round 3, but the Hollander in me didn’t want to blow another $12 so instead, I used that and more to hit the Dairy Queen outside of the park on our way back to Michigan.

Road Trip

Back when the Pistons were tailing off from their Championship in 2004 the former President of the Orlando Magic use to play pick up basketball at MVP. He handed out a bunch of tickets for us to a Pistons playoff game against the Magic. The crew that played at MVP at the time was fairly new to me but I somehow managed to get the invite and it probably had something to do with me arranging for a party bus (it actually had a stripper pole but the downside is the side door on the bus didn’t really work and was probably a major safety hazard) to take us to the Palace of Auburn Hills. Right out of the gate our bus driver rear ended another vehicle on the way to the liquor store to get roadies for the 2 and a half hour ride. No sooner than the driver could get out of his seat did the vehicle in front of us speed off. Either the guy was drunk, didn’t have a license, or both. We headed over to the Palace fully stocked with booze and managed to drink most of it in route to the Palace. A majority of us were loaded as we entered the Palace and to everyone’s surprise a former NFL lineman who was with us was the first one to end up puking, unfortunately it was after he entered the venue. Our ticket provider gave us four good seats near the Orlando bench and the rest were upper level seats, they weren’t terrible but they weren’t awesome. The plan was to rotate everyone out of those seats but due to my over consumption of alcohol I didn’t exactly stick with the plan and had to be escorted out of my seat by one of the other people in our group. On the ride home one of the guys wanted to stop for more beer but the bus driver was resolute and wouldn’t cave to his request.

While I look back on that trip with a degree of fondness, the actual experience was probably akin to fighting in a war, it wasn’t all bad, but most of it was. (one of the 7 readers of this blog was on the trip with me and he is still working with his therapist through the experience) Fast forward to late summer of this year, there is a guy in our golf league who arranges various trips and a trip he had arranged was to the Lion’s Bills game that was this past Sunday. It was the classic case of something that sounds really good at the time but when the time rolls around to actually participate in the event there aren’t many things you would less rather do. I actually tried to get out of the trip by texting the organizer that it was my father in law’s birthday party on Sunday and I should probably bow out if he could find someone to take my ticket. I told Shirley that I was trying to replace myself on the trip (after just having told he I was going on the trip) and she said it sounded like fun and that I should go. I knew bette but let her talk me into thinking it was still a good idea.

We met at the Gravity Park and Ride at noon and I still had questioned my decision not to drive myself, I wanted to save on parking, but in hindsight would have paid at least $500 for parking if it got me out of the horrors of that bus trip. The crew was definitely a mixed bag and not to be a snob, but I am going to sound like one, mostly blue collar guys who probably get fucked up every weekend and some weekdays and that’s what they liver for. There was discussion about a group of them meeting for drinks at Gravity before the bus so I had an inkling already what to mentally prepare for, but nothing could really prepare me for what I was going to experience that day. First of all, the most annoying person in my golf league, possibly most annoying person I have ever encountered, was going to be on the trip. When we boarded the bus he immediately hooked his phone up to the bluetooth on the bus and began playing his music as loud as it would go. He skipped through songs like a flat stone across a lake, with his fist periodically pumping in the air like we were at a rave. Of course he had his hat on backwards, he was the prototypical hat on backwards guy, 99% of hat on backwards guys are intolerable. He also enjoyed randomly doing knuckles for no reason, I don’t like doing knuckles when there is a reason, why the fuck do you keep sticking your fist out, leave me alone.

As we were getting close to Lowell the captain of our trip instructed the driver that we were to stop at every rest stop on the way to Ford Field. Not because we need a bathroom break, there was a bathroom on the bus, but because we needed to get out and smoke periodically. I didn’t realize people still smoked, again I sound like a snob here, but I don’t hang out with people who smoke, it’s a disgusting habit, ok, one of my good friends smokes, and when we were golfing this past spring we were riding together and someone hit a ball under our cart while we were sitting in it and he was holding his pack of smokes, it caused his smokes to go flying everywhere when he was startled by the oncoming golf ball. It was pretty funny, but he’s one of the few people I’d be willing to overlook the smoking thing and still hang out with. Midway between the first and second rest stop two guys snorted some cocaine. Witnessing that may be an every day occurrence for some people, but it caught me off guard and I’m a criminal defense attorney. One of the guys who was doing it has a the torso of someone who is 6’6 and midget arms and legs and he’s missing part of his ear. Why is he so fucked up? Because his mother did drugs while he was in utero, and I guess he’s been addicted ever since. The other guy was the only black guy on the trip and he was wearing a fuzzy Honolulu blue lion’s hat that looked like a top hat but it was fuzzy, it looked awesome on him, but would have looked ridiculous on any of the rest of us.

There was a guy sitting across from me (it was limo style seating) who was wearing big headphones and reminded me of Warren from There’s Something about Mary. He was eating marijuana gummies like they were skittles. He also had a number of the mannerisms Warren possessed and was likely on the spectrum. No one seemed to know the guy so I have no idea how he wound up on the trip. As we were nearing Ford Field the super fucking annoying guy from my golf league, we can call him knuckles, started talking about a tailgate he was invited to at Greyson. Greyson is a high end golf apparel store where you pay $300 for the same golf pants you can get at Costco for $30. He invited the guy next to me who hates him but is more tolerable of annoying people than I am, and he came up with some BS excuse why he couldn’t go with him to the tailgate. Once in the stadium we walked around a bit and our party continued to drink like it was the last day of their lives, or just another day for them I guess, and I continued not to drink. I didn’t see paying $15 for Miller Lite, it’s not good, and getting a buzz on would just exacerbate my problematic circumstances. Once we sat down I didn’t leave my seat, it was a fun game to watch even though the Lions lost and had three more key players go down with major injuries. However, Josh Allen in person is amazing. I don’t think you can fully appreciate the throws he makes unless you are in person.

With the Lions losing, I thought it would be a fairly benign ride home. I figured the loss would take the wind out of everyone’s sails and we could have some peace and quiet on our way back to GR. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Knuckles quickly realized no one else was going to be the Dj so he fired up the tunes, some dip shit took 20 extra minutes to get back to the bus, and a few of the high ons who were thinking ahead chowed down on their soggy Jimmy John’s sandwiches that most of us ate on our way there. Knuckles took it upon himself to try and talk to me even though I had my air pods in, I wanted to ask him “what part of this isn’t telling you to fuck off?” but instead I kept my answers to his stupid questions really short, I got a parting fist bump from him, which I think was an admission of defeat, and I never spoke to him again. Two good friends of mine were on the trip, one of them, thinks of me as a good friend, Kevin Clark, my only friend who smokes, and another guy by the name of Geoff, I am not sure where I stand on his friend list, but we do a lot of stuff together, he may be just tolerating me in the hopes that I quit my golf league (or get kicked out of it again) and he can take my place and become a permanent member of the league instead of just a sub. Why do I mention them? Because they are both laid back and super chill. That’s what it takes to go on a bus trip like I just described. On top of it, Geoff, and Kevin to a degree are incredibly positive. Geoff is the type of guy who will compliment your shot in golf even if it lands in the middle of the pond, my response to a similar shot would be “that was terrible”.

Do I want to be like Geoff and Kevin? Maybe. Am I 50 years old and is there any hope for me changing? Probably not. Two things occurred recently that make me realize I am probably an asshole for life. The first was at a Christmas party where the guy who organized the bus trip and is in my golf league was telling Shirley I’m an asshole, but I’m their asshole (meaning the guys in the league I am friends with) I took this as a good thing, but I’m starting to wonder. The second thing happened while meeting with a client this week. The client asked me how frank he could be with me, I told him not to hold back. He went on to say that he had been researching me and discovered that I am an asshole. So, when you Google my name I guess “he’s an asshole” is the first thing that comes up. I may want to see about that reputation service you can hire to fix negative things about you on the internet. That being said, I have lived here long enough, met enough people, and know that West Michigan is a tight enough knit community, that I am probably always going to be known as the asshole to some degree, my only hope would be either entering the witness protection program and starting fresh or hitting my head and having amnesia like Harrison Ford in that one movie, and actually becoming a nice person. I don’t really have a reason to enter the witness protection plan, but at my advanced age you never know when I may take a tumble and hit my head so there is hope.

Time Squared

Shirley has been going to New York on trips for a few years now and it all started back when her cousin moved to Brooklyn. Her cousin served as a tour guide for the trips that involved Shirley’s sisters and cousins and Shirley did a good job of romanticizing NYC even though I knew going there to sight see would likely inflict significant PTSD. Well, I finally bit the bullet and planned a trip for the Jansma’s for the weekend after Shirley and Aiden’s birthday (11.13.10 for Aiden and 11.13.?? for Shirley). We flew out of GR and as I was getting ready to board the plane I asked myself are there husbands who ask their wives if they can buy WIFI when they are on a flight together? The idea of asking my wife if I can buy wifi seems almost as ridiculous as asking if I can buy another pair of Airforce Ones (I have four pair currently, my latest edition are white with a pink swoosh, I love them). However, I am sure there are men who do ask, and those men are the same men who have to sit down when they pee.

We flew out of GR at 6pm on Friday night and landed in Laguardia a little after 8. We had roughly five or six miles to get from Queens to where we were staying in Manhattan and it took an hour and a half to get there. The cab driver suggested that any backpacks be placed in the trunk so that they didn’t block the vents but Aiden decided to keep his with him for the express purpose of blocking the vents. It was like the center of the sun in the back of the cab but Shirley and the cab driver were completely comfortable. The hotel we stayed at was quite close to Time’s Square and after checking in we embarked on a trip to go people watching and catch a late dinner. As we neared Times Square I was overwhelmed with the amazing food options, Red Lobster, Olive Garden, and TGI Fridays just to mention a few. However, we wanted to get authentic cuisine and settled on a pizza place to get some of that New York pizza everyone speaks so fondly of. Unfortunately, we made it back to the room in time to stream the Tyson/Paul fight.

Our Saturday itinerary was to begin with a trip to the 911 memorial and then we would play it by ear. We walked around the area and then decided we should hit the observatory at the top of one World Trade Center. It was a sunny day with completely clear visibility and the views were breathtaking. I could have stayed up there for a bit longer but Parker was getting bored so we headed down and decided since we were close to where the ferry was to go to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, we should probably knock that out while we were over there. In order to get to the ferry you have to endure some hard core soliciting from a number of unsavory individuals. New York hats, sweatshirts, and “fresh” fruit were the primary wares these folks were trying to peddle. Fortunately, I give off a fairly obvious “fuck you” aura so most people leave me alone. However, I frequently wear Lions, Pistons, Tigers or U of M apparel and this makes people think they have some type of in with me and that if they mention the particular team I happen to be wearing I will buy something from them. This couldn’t be further from the case. While I will gladly talk to a perfect stranger about Cade Cunningham’s turnover issues or Jared Goff’s lack of mobility that can be compensated for by his pinpoint accuracy and one of the best offensive l lines ever assembled, anyone who doesn’t genuinely care about my take on any of the sports teams I root for, can fuck off.

Aiden really wanted to get off and tour the area where the Statue of Liberty is but we convinced him otherwise due to the fact that it would have involved disembarking from the ferry and then getting back in line and boarding another ferry to go to Ellis Island where we would have to do it all over again. Ellis Island was amazing and would have been even more amazing if my kids weren’t with me. I have to admit, I got kind of emotional seeing what the immigrants who came to our country went through to get here, what they endured when they got here, and how great of an opportunity it was to be allowed to immigrate here. I was maybe 20% through the first area when my family began calling to inquire about my where a-bouts and tell me to get moving. Eventually I gave into their demands and reluctantly left the wing of the museum to go meet up with them. We had walked miles and miles and decided to return to the hotel for some rest before we met up with Shirley’s cousin at a park near our hotel where they had a Christmas Bizarre going on. The 60 degree temperatures didn’t seem very Christmasy and the throngs of people being herded into the park made the holiday spirit even more difficult to generate. Dinner was at an Italian restaurant that was underwhelming but we managed to locate an incredible gelato place near Madison Square Garden that more than made up for our lackluster dinner. Now the first thing I noticed, and I admit this isn’t normal, was that it would be nearly impossible to run around our hotel. In addition, I try to get some form of exercise in almost every day, walking 12 miles wasn’t exercise in my book but I was too tired when I got back to the hotel on Saturday to go for a run. So, Sunday morning I got up early and made my way over to the East River for a run. It was pretty awesome to run with the Manhattan skyline in view along with the river and various other landmarks. It was relief to get my run out of the way and when I got back to the hotel we decided to head to Central Park. Again, the weather was sunny and in the 60’s, pretty remarkable for mid November. Central Park was incredible.

After Central Park we were toying with either going to the MET or hitting Fifth Avenue where all the famous shopping is located. Shirley wanted to go the MET but since it was also Aiden’s birthday weekend he won out and we hit Fifth Avenue. I had to pee real bad and regretted not hitting the Central Park lavatory on my way out. There was a port a potty near a construction site but it had a lock on it. Locking a port a potty? So, I ended up buying a drink at Chipotle so I could get their bathroom code. As I was about to enter the bathroom some homeless guy was going to enter it, with an entirely different code none the less, but he let me go first. However, there was someone in there when the homeless guy opened the door to let me in. It was some rough looking older women who was spraying something into her mouth but it probably wasn’t breath freshener. I returned back to the Mediterranean lunch place thinking that the Chicken Shawarma bowl that I told Shirley to get me would be waiting. Turns out she ordered me the wrong thing. I lost my shit to a degree but kind of hid it. In my defense, this was way more time than I was use to spending with my family. That Saturday felt like three Saturdays, I remember thinking to myself at 11 am Saturday morning that it felt like 4pm. Not that I don’t like my family, but I am use to doing stuff I like on the weekends that typically doesn’t involve spending time with them. (they don’t really like me either so I don’t feel all that bad about it).

After we had hit our late lunch we went a little further down fifth avenue and ended up touring St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Again, my kids were an encumbrance to truly enjoying the experience. They had a bunch of Saints all over the place and a little bio on them. However, my kids didn’t have the patience for me to read all the bios. I had heard Saint Carl was the Saint of dad’s who are extremely annoyed by their families, and I was hoping to find him. After our Fifth Avenue tour we made our way to a subway stop that would take us back to the hotel so we could recharge before going out for dinner and a broadway show. Initially I had suggested we go to the Knicks Nets game a MSG that Sunday night, but Shirley thought Book of Mormon was a better option. Shirley had gone out to hit the Christmas bizarre again while the kids and I went to Nordstrom Rack by our hotel in hopes of finding some deals on cologne. My kids have somehow gotten into designer fragrances. However, even if we had found the JPG gold fragrance

at a reasonable price, the line was way too long to purchase it. When we caught up to Shirley I told her I needed to pee (poor planning on my part knowing what I knew about the availability of public toilets in NYC) and I looked in the beer garden she was at for some sign of a toilet, but it was like being in the dessert and trying to find water. She said there was some taco place near there and maybe it had a bathroom and then she proceeded to walk around aimlessly while my bladder almost exploded. Eventually I lost my shit and expressed what I believed to be much warranted frustration. Ultimately, I had to buy a bottle of water at a convenience store so I could get their bathroom code to take a wiz. This time there was a person in the bathroom and they had the door locked. Eventually I pounded on the door and the response was “I’m in here” to which I responded “hurry up” the person came out saying “unfucking believable dude!” Not sure why people like to loiter in public bathrooms in NYC, but I’m of the opinion that one should get in and get out. Finding the taco place I immediately nixed it due to the fact that it resembled the chaos that is the Costco cafeteria on a Saturday afternoon but without the organizational structure the best warehouse club on the planet has to offer. We ended up at a sushi place where I was able to watch most of the second half of the Bills/Chiefs game.

The play we had settled on was The Book of Mormon. For some reason we thought our kids would enjoy a broadway musical since it was by the creators of South Park, we were wrong. We ended up leaving at intermission, which wasn’t terrible since Shirley and I had both seen it before. Regardless, I am sure there were some patrons wondering who in their right mind would bring a 14 and 11 year old to this. The answer would be Shirley and I. I don’t even want to get into the movies they have already watched and who knows what kind of shit they are seeing on the internet. If I had the unfettered access they have I would have never left my room, that’s why I am so proud of them for the ten minutes a day they do.

This morning we had to catch a 5:30 Uber to make sure we made it onto our 8am flight. The ride over to the airport was uneventful and the flight was more of the same. When we touched down a little after 10 I nonchalantly asked Shirley if she could bring the kids to school, not letting on to the fact that I wanted to get to MVP for the brunch basketball run followed by a little bit of tennis. It was good to be home.

Time Share

The Jansma’s, after spending the past two spring breaks driving (I did the lion’s share of the driving) down to Destin Florida to get away, decided to change it up and stay at the Iberostar in Riviera Maya. I was in charge of booking flights and initially looked to grab something on Spirit knowing they had direct flights from Detroit to Cancun. Due to the fact that Spirit charges you for everything, even a la carte for the oxygen in the cabin, I scrapped that idea and booked on American Airlines since I have a credit card and am accumulating airline miles. I put almost all of my monthly expenses on my card and am routinely shocked when I go to pay my statement and find out what I have spent. With that in mind, I figured I had enough miles to get us to Australia but in reality would have had a tough time flying from Detroit to Cleveland with the miles I had accrued. (Made me feel quite foolish thinking I’d be able to fly the entire family to Europe this summer on my miles). Our flight left at 12:59 out of Detroit on Saturday. This gave me a chance to play tennis prior to leaving. The unfortunate thing is my kids don’t take after me in most things, but especially when it comes to traveling. They are anxious travelers just like their mom and Shirley called me when I was only midway through my first set. My plan was to leave around 9 or a little after 9, Shirley wanted us on the road no later than 8:30. I cut my tennis short knowing we would have plenty of time, but since turning 50 I have realized life isn’t all about me, just mostly. To everyone’s surprise but me, we arrived at the airport in plenty of time. Two things I don’t understand, why people want to arrive at the airport hours prior to their flight and why they insist on getting on the plane right away when there is assigned seating.

We landed around 7 and it took us roughly 3 hours to get our bags, ground transportation, and arrive at the resort. We made it just in time to eat at one of the buffets at the resort prior to it being shut down. While I was the epitome of a weary traveler from being around my family for an entire day, I was able to rally when I discovered there was a Starbucks walking distance from our resort. I have become addicted to cold brews, I gave up energy drinks years ago in favor of what I believe to be a healthier way to imbibe caffeine. (I may be entirely wrong about that, but ignorance is bliss) Whenever I go on a trip I need to get some type of routine going, unfortunately, my routine was unlikely to involve much, if any sex, due to all of us sleeping in the same room. One of my routines was going to Starbucks in the morning and midway through the week I took my kids with me. That increased the bill substantially but that particular time it was well worth it. We had eaten at the authentic Mexican restaurant at the all inclusive the night before, I had taken two shits already, but I was still a bit concerned about the quarter mile walk to Starbucks. After placing our order, I headed to the second floor to go for deuce number 3, which normally I would call a good morning, actually a good day. I made a rookie mistake, after dropping the kids off at the pool I looked over to discover an empty toilet paper roll. The Starbucks had a main floor and then it was open air with a second floor veranda that had some seating and the bathroom. I pinched my cheeks together, pulled up my shorts and waddled out of the bathroom. I informed my kids that one of them needed to bring me some napkins because there was no toilet paper in the restroom. If it was me being summoned to do that for my dad, a dad who routinely called me pizza face and bean pole, I would have told him to fuck off. However, Aiden, came up with a fistful of napkins. The good news is that it is customary in Mexico to throw your butt wipings into the trash so it wasn’t a problem to wipe my ass with napkins, other than the fact that I had taken two previous dumps, and my anus was more vulnerable than Taylor Swift after her relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal.

Back in the day we went on a family vacation to Colorado and my parents went to the bank (or somewhere else) prior to our trip and secured a bunch of traveler’s checks. Looking back, traveler’s checks seem almost as practical as owning a phone book. Similarly, it used to be customary to exchange dollars for pesos, or whatever the currency in the foreign country may be. However, with the prevalence of credit cards, and the ability of everyone to take them, and the willingness of non business people to accept dollars (cab drivers, wait staff, prostitutes) exchanging currency was completely unnecessary. While part of my morning routine was Starbucks, part of my afternoon routine included Starbucks and a trip to Seven Eleven to get snacks. It took me until late Wednesday to determine what the actual exchange rate was. I may have gone the entire trip without knowing, but Parker and I stumbled upon a cool hat store in the same shopping plaza as the Starbucks and 7-11. I found a hat with a rooster on it and was going to buy it for my buddy I play pickle ball with because his nickname is the rooster for the way he struts around when he’s about to lose trying to intimidate his opponents. The hat was 890 pesos, could be $5 or could be $50. Turns out it was closer to $50, much closer. For every dollar you get 16.5 pesos. We were dropping close to 200 hundred pesos on bags of lays chips and munchers. A king size Cadbury chocolate bar was nearly ten dollars. Doing the math the next morning at Starbucks, I was dropping nearly $40 when my assistant butt wipers accompanied me.

The reality of what we had actually spent on frivolous things, when coupled with what we spent on the actual vacation, is the only reason I let Shirley talk me into doing a presentation to potentially join the Iberostar “Vacation Club”. When Shirley had scheduled one of our excursions they told her that if she did a tour with a salesperson we could get $150. Since she had already paid for the excursion they indicated it could be cold hard cash. She scheduled the 90 minute meeting for Friday, our last day there. We met them at the resort spa where we were first introduced to a women who obtained our information (which I am pretty sure they already had) in turn the women introduced us to our guide who we ate breakfast with. He then took us on a tour of the resort that involved the beach area that was sequestered off for the benefit of the vacation club members. The only real selling point was they served middle shelf liquor at this area instead of the kind that makes you shit your pants and never want to drink again if you manage to imbibe enough to get remotely intoxicated. After the tour he bought us back to the sales office where he told us we were going to meet his sales manager, I could barely contain myself I was so excited. The sales manager looked like someone you would encounter at one of the used car lots on south division or 28th street. They had a touch point presentation showing their various resorts after the introduction. We then sat down to crunch some numbers. At no point had they alluded to the cost of this but I told them early on, I am a bottom line guy, what does it cost. The sales guy said “don’t you want to know all of the benefits before you hear the price?” I should have said no, but I Just mumbled something intelligible.

They sat us down in a cubicle and the manger took a piece of scratch paper and a big calculator, the kind that dumb kids use in their Math 099 class in college, and started doing some pretty fuzzy math. There are three different levels you could buy into. The black, blue, and silver. Silver was ten years, blue, fifteen, and black 30. Similar to what they do at a car lot, they gave us the black sales spiel first. Here is the Navigator Black label, it’s $130,000. You take it for a ride and all you can think about is pulling up to the Chick-Fil-A drive thru in it. If you get past the fact of how ridiculous it is to pay that much for a vehicle, when they take you for a ride in the Aviator and tell you it’s 70k, it seems like a deal. If you are the type of person who wants to be seen in the Navigator ordering your Oreo shake and at all of your kids sporting events, it worked out either way for them, but probably not you when you drive your Navigator off the lot and it is immediately worth $109,000. I understood the math, I realized that if what they were saying was true, and I knew it wasn’t, there would be value in the vacation club depending on the price. On top of it all, they promised a buy back program in the upper two levels where you would get $500 per airline ticket for up to two tickets for your flights when you stayed at a resort. However, Shirley who once told the kids as they were watching Umi Zoomi (it’s a counting and math show for kids) on PBS that 3 times 0 is 3, was really struggling with all the basic math that was being thrown out and when the sales person said the upper level was $95,000, almost what your Lincoln Navigator depreciates to when you drive it off the lot, she told them she needed to leave to go take her Adderall.

Obviously, they don’t want you to leave, and when I told them that even if you get your 95k back at the end of the 30 years (I’d be 80) I could have done a lot more with it in the market than just getting that amount back. The guy realized we weren’t going black. So, they started working on the blue level. When they realized that wasn’t happening they decided to sweeten up the lowest level by adding five years to the membership at no additional cost and some hybrid form of the airline buy back program. Shirley indicated she wanted to take the contract with her and read it and the sales guy responded by saying the contract was copyrighted and he couldn’t allow her to do that. They already knew we were both attorneys so I am not sure why he thought that would be believable, a contract isn’t intellectual property that need to be protected. Seeing the sale going sideways, similar to when a husband has his wife in the sweet spot of intoxication at a gathering, knowing he is going to score, only to watch her get sloppy drunk, destroying any hopes of some moderately good sex after the party, the sales team brought in another guy who offered us some trial membership. Initially it was indicated to us that if we walked away the opportunity was gone. The sales team changed that to a noon deadline. The new guy told us a year.

Obviously, Shirley and I got up and walked away, like anyone with at least 3 functioning brain cells would do. However, and I knew this was a problem. The sales guy was as obtuse about the $150 when we were at breakfast, as his cohort was with the numbers he was using to make it seem like we would be making money by joining the time share, I mean vacation club. Since Shirley had gotten us into the mess I made her go to the lobby to retrieve our payment after we had eaten lunch. When she came back she was fired up, they had initially told her that the sales people were gone and she wasn’t going to get the $150. When that didn’t work they tried to come back and pay her in Iberostar bucks, nope, finally they relented to get the crazy white lady out of the lobby, and handed her $150. In hindsight I should have told them I’d sign up for the club if they added one perk. I needed a conjugal visit room to access at anytime I see fit (Which wouldn’t be a lot because Shirley would also need to be on board) so that I could have sex while staying at the resort. On the third day of the trip when we were at the pool I told Shirley we need to get the kids out of the room so we could have sex, surprisingly she agreed. I told the kids when I got back to the room a little ahead of Shirley that they were going to have to leave. The didn’t take it well but ultimately complied.

The week went by unsurprisingly fast and the Saturday after we arrived we had to wake up at 4 to get our ride to the airport. Again, we arrived with plenty of time to spare, allowing me to browse the duty free store. As Jerry Seinfeld would say “what’s the deal with Duty Free?” My kids have been on this kick obsessing about John Paul Gaultier cologne. Apparently it has gained quite a bit of steam because of the uniqueness of the bottle, which looks like a statute with no arms, legs, or head. I had a bottle of it 20 years ago and really liked it. So, when I found it at Nordstrom Rack for $30, I bought some more. It was $140 at duty free. The prices are worse than you would pay for the stuff under normal circumstances and it’s a pain in the ass to tote the stuff you buy there along with you on the rest of your journey. And as far as toting stuff along with you. We had to go through customs as well as your usual TSA check. I have no idea how people who have 7 balloons of heroin shoved up their ass can act all calm, cool, and collected. I have a t-shirt I bought and forget to declare with Customs and I’m sweating bullets worried I’m going to spend 3 to 5 years in a Mexican prison. I’m really glad I didn’t buy that rooster hat.