Post by victoriasdad on Sept 8, 2008 1:56:51 GMT -5
beth and i finally did it., left all the kids at home, we havent been away from them for more than three days in eighteen years, booked a cruise, saved some fun money, bought "cruise clothes" and off we went,
we flew in from idaho to lax in las angelos, jumped into a shuttle van to go to our hotel room, unfortunately our driver was in so much of a hurry he decided to cut across two lanes of oncoming traffic and we got T-boned by a taxi, the taxi hit us broadside on our rear tire sending us onto and over the front of the taxi, my head was slammed into the top of the window and roof of the van and then back into beth who was rebounding off the opposite wall, shaken up but not hurt it seemed, until the next day on the cruise ship , when i discovered i could barely walk having thrown out my lower back, (i have three bulging discs) i went to the cruise doctor she took xrays and gave me a shot of demoral , told me i would sleep all night and wake up fine, i took a nap for two hours and was up all night, the next day we made port in cabo, i made a bee line for the fleamarket to get a cane, i was in excruciating pain, so when i get to the vendor he takes one look at me and tells me that the crappy multicolored, carved by a five year old cane he is holding is worth twenty dollars, i need the cane, he knows i know i need the cane so i tell him ten dollars, grinding my teeth because i know i could buy the same cane in the dollar store back home for.....well ... a dollar... he looks at the sweat poring off of my forehead and the pain in my eyes and tells me fifteen, i tell him ten..... he says fifteen i tell him 12.50 he smiles and tells me fifteen, i give the heartless parasite on the misery of humanity the fifteen dollars and curse his grandmother as i hobble away to find the nearest cold pacifico... when we get back to the ship we get a note from the customer relations department that we have exceeded our ship credit, thats also when we get the bill for 740.00 for the hospital visit, so now we have no shipboard credit , so now we are stuck on a cruise where we cant buy booze, cant book any excursions, cant even play bingo.. meanwhile my back gets progressively worse, i can barely hobble around the ship, we hire a private tour van when we get to maztland so there was minimal walking thank god, but no walks on the beach, no dancing in the senor frogs, nothing like what we had planned........... i was so disapointed not only for myself but for my wife, i felt like i let her down, the next day we hit puerto vallarta, we hobbled down to the docks, in the distance i saw a shimmering light, the smell of calikas rising up in the air..... u know this could be heaven or this could be hell, no it wasnt the hotel california it was....... the WALMART! we slowly made our way out of the marina across six lanes of mexican traffic( lol the traffic signs dont have a walk/dont walk sign, they have a figure of a man running!) i felt like a very sweaty frogger.. we made it to the walmart parking lot i grabbed the nearest shopping cart to use as a walker, we were almost killed by the rows of speeding taxis in the parking lot, we made it through the doors! u know there is nothing that makes u feel more safe and surrounded by love than a walmart!! and they had AIR CONDITIONING !!! i forgot to mention the 90% humidity didnt i? now we were in walmart , beth and i looked at each other , i asked her "well we are here what did u need to buy", she looked at me and said " i thought u needed something"......... after much discussion we decided to buy two liters of pepsi , (as they only serve coke on the ship), when we got back to the ship we discovered that american pepsi and mexican pepsi are not .......... made with the same ingredients, evidently we americans have been getting ripped off all this time, i guess pepsico in order to save money in the good old usa has decided to omit the main ingredient in mexican pepsi,,,, beth and i kept swishing the pepsi around and around in our mouths trying to decide what that secret ingredient is......... beth finally figured it out ,,DISH SOAP!, yup, mexican pepsi tastes like dish soap, so i am asking all of you loyal pepsi drinkers to stand up to the cost cutting CEO of pepsico inc. and demand our fair share of dishsoap in our pepsi, you guys dont know what you are missing,..two days back to the states , we dock . then onto a full size bus to the airport, barely miss running into a fuel truck on the free way, our driver runs some nice friendly people out of their lane, i know they are friendly because they follow us for a couple of miles , they must of been friends of the bus drivers because they kept honking and i think they may have been hearing impaired also because they kept using sign language at us, i think they may have known only one sign though , u know the one , u stick your middle finger up and raise and lower your fist in a up and down motion! well we finally made it to the airport and went into the building where there were hundreds of us running around frantically, to the "new" automated checkout! remember im still in excruciating pain, and there is a man with a bull horn yelling at us, demanding that we take the next vacant "automatic" bag checker thingmabob, envision this sight, there is total bedlam and here is this impecalably (sic)dressed, middle aged african american man wearing a , smart little vest on, shoes that shone like mirrors , a neatly trimmed graying beard and a squared away 1930's hair cut, really nice, and ..... i dont know much about gel and doo and all that being a balding middle aged man,,,, but he had this stuff on his hair, and it was on so thick it looked like the whole jar of vaseline and the frosting on a cinnamon roll,,,and he is yelling at us(not beth and i, but he is yelling at all of us) because we are too stupid to
realize there is a vacant checker thingmabob, so finally we get to the checker thingie, and beth follows the instructions and puts her credit card into the slot, it refuses to read the card, remember the mass of humanity , the noise , the chaos, the guy with he bull horn, so beth uses the passport option, and sticks it into the slot, where it gets stuck, crammed in stuck actually, she asks the attendant for help and the lady sneers at her and walks off, finally beth realizes that the passport has to be open to be scanned,(cuz there is a picture of an open passport next to the slot) but its really stuck, i need a knife to dig it out,, well that aint happening, we are at the airport after all, so i pry it out with a ball point pin, im a hero! whereapon beth opens it to her picture and crams it in again! i say "maybe its not in far enough and cram it in somemore it just doesnt look right... thats when we notice the scanner tray over to the side,, it seems the slot we stuck her passport in is where the tags come out for your luggage, beth is about to cry, im about to pass out from pain, beth kept asking the attendant for help, and being ignored, i actually for a brief moment was going to scream BOMB! just so someone , anyone would come and help us! finally beth tells the attendant, LOOK YOU DONT UNDERSTAND! MY PASSPORT IS STUCK IN THIS SLOT AND WE ARENT LEAVING UNTIL I GET MY PASSPORT OUT! "oh" says the attendant,like why ever didnt you say so before, she yells to another attendant and they take out their keys and open the machine and gets the passport out. there is a loud hurrah! from the countless mass of humanity waiting to use our thingmabob and we check our bags! wallah! "automated" what a time saver! we go through security and they ask me if i can walk with out my cane................ uh ........... look into my eyes....... do i look like i can walk without it? three hour wait for our plane,, finally made it home , to beautiful idaho, i was never so happy to be home, it was almost as good as bieing in a walmart in a foriegn country..............tomorrow ....im letting my fingers do the walking im going to find a good lawyer............
we flew in from idaho to lax in las angelos, jumped into a shuttle van to go to our hotel room, unfortunately our driver was in so much of a hurry he decided to cut across two lanes of oncoming traffic and we got T-boned by a taxi, the taxi hit us broadside on our rear tire sending us onto and over the front of the taxi, my head was slammed into the top of the window and roof of the van and then back into beth who was rebounding off the opposite wall, shaken up but not hurt it seemed, until the next day on the cruise ship , when i discovered i could barely walk having thrown out my lower back, (i have three bulging discs) i went to the cruise doctor she took xrays and gave me a shot of demoral , told me i would sleep all night and wake up fine, i took a nap for two hours and was up all night, the next day we made port in cabo, i made a bee line for the fleamarket to get a cane, i was in excruciating pain, so when i get to the vendor he takes one look at me and tells me that the crappy multicolored, carved by a five year old cane he is holding is worth twenty dollars, i need the cane, he knows i know i need the cane so i tell him ten dollars, grinding my teeth because i know i could buy the same cane in the dollar store back home for.....well ... a dollar... he looks at the sweat poring off of my forehead and the pain in my eyes and tells me fifteen, i tell him ten..... he says fifteen i tell him 12.50 he smiles and tells me fifteen, i give the heartless parasite on the misery of humanity the fifteen dollars and curse his grandmother as i hobble away to find the nearest cold pacifico... when we get back to the ship we get a note from the customer relations department that we have exceeded our ship credit, thats also when we get the bill for 740.00 for the hospital visit, so now we have no shipboard credit , so now we are stuck on a cruise where we cant buy booze, cant book any excursions, cant even play bingo.. meanwhile my back gets progressively worse, i can barely hobble around the ship, we hire a private tour van when we get to maztland so there was minimal walking thank god, but no walks on the beach, no dancing in the senor frogs, nothing like what we had planned........... i was so disapointed not only for myself but for my wife, i felt like i let her down, the next day we hit puerto vallarta, we hobbled down to the docks, in the distance i saw a shimmering light, the smell of calikas rising up in the air..... u know this could be heaven or this could be hell, no it wasnt the hotel california it was....... the WALMART! we slowly made our way out of the marina across six lanes of mexican traffic( lol the traffic signs dont have a walk/dont walk sign, they have a figure of a man running!) i felt like a very sweaty frogger.. we made it to the walmart parking lot i grabbed the nearest shopping cart to use as a walker, we were almost killed by the rows of speeding taxis in the parking lot, we made it through the doors! u know there is nothing that makes u feel more safe and surrounded by love than a walmart!! and they had AIR CONDITIONING !!! i forgot to mention the 90% humidity didnt i? now we were in walmart , beth and i looked at each other , i asked her "well we are here what did u need to buy", she looked at me and said " i thought u needed something"......... after much discussion we decided to buy two liters of pepsi , (as they only serve coke on the ship), when we got back to the ship we discovered that american pepsi and mexican pepsi are not .......... made with the same ingredients, evidently we americans have been getting ripped off all this time, i guess pepsico in order to save money in the good old usa has decided to omit the main ingredient in mexican pepsi,,,, beth and i kept swishing the pepsi around and around in our mouths trying to decide what that secret ingredient is......... beth finally figured it out ,,DISH SOAP!, yup, mexican pepsi tastes like dish soap, so i am asking all of you loyal pepsi drinkers to stand up to the cost cutting CEO of pepsico inc. and demand our fair share of dishsoap in our pepsi, you guys dont know what you are missing,..two days back to the states , we dock . then onto a full size bus to the airport, barely miss running into a fuel truck on the free way, our driver runs some nice friendly people out of their lane, i know they are friendly because they follow us for a couple of miles , they must of been friends of the bus drivers because they kept honking and i think they may have been hearing impaired also because they kept using sign language at us, i think they may have known only one sign though , u know the one , u stick your middle finger up and raise and lower your fist in a up and down motion! well we finally made it to the airport and went into the building where there were hundreds of us running around frantically, to the "new" automated checkout! remember im still in excruciating pain, and there is a man with a bull horn yelling at us, demanding that we take the next vacant "automatic" bag checker thingmabob, envision this sight, there is total bedlam and here is this impecalably (sic)dressed, middle aged african american man wearing a , smart little vest on, shoes that shone like mirrors , a neatly trimmed graying beard and a squared away 1930's hair cut, really nice, and ..... i dont know much about gel and doo and all that being a balding middle aged man,,,, but he had this stuff on his hair, and it was on so thick it looked like the whole jar of vaseline and the frosting on a cinnamon roll,,,and he is yelling at us(not beth and i, but he is yelling at all of us) because we are too stupid to
realize there is a vacant checker thingmabob, so finally we get to the checker thingie, and beth follows the instructions and puts her credit card into the slot, it refuses to read the card, remember the mass of humanity , the noise , the chaos, the guy with he bull horn, so beth uses the passport option, and sticks it into the slot, where it gets stuck, crammed in stuck actually, she asks the attendant for help and the lady sneers at her and walks off, finally beth realizes that the passport has to be open to be scanned,(cuz there is a picture of an open passport next to the slot) but its really stuck, i need a knife to dig it out,, well that aint happening, we are at the airport after all, so i pry it out with a ball point pin, im a hero! whereapon beth opens it to her picture and crams it in again! i say "maybe its not in far enough and cram it in somemore it just doesnt look right... thats when we notice the scanner tray over to the side,, it seems the slot we stuck her passport in is where the tags come out for your luggage, beth is about to cry, im about to pass out from pain, beth kept asking the attendant for help, and being ignored, i actually for a brief moment was going to scream BOMB! just so someone , anyone would come and help us! finally beth tells the attendant, LOOK YOU DONT UNDERSTAND! MY PASSPORT IS STUCK IN THIS SLOT AND WE ARENT LEAVING UNTIL I GET MY PASSPORT OUT! "oh" says the attendant,like why ever didnt you say so before, she yells to another attendant and they take out their keys and open the machine and gets the passport out. there is a loud hurrah! from the countless mass of humanity waiting to use our thingmabob and we check our bags! wallah! "automated" what a time saver! we go through security and they ask me if i can walk with out my cane................ uh ........... look into my eyes....... do i look like i can walk without it? three hour wait for our plane,, finally made it home , to beautiful idaho, i was never so happy to be home, it was almost as good as bieing in a walmart in a foriegn country..............tomorrow ....im letting my fingers do the walking im going to find a good lawyer............