Monster Trucks and Smelly Guy

My 3-year-old son is all boy. He pretends everything is a gun and makes a lot of sound effects. Recently, we watched Monster Jams on TV (probably the Speed Channel) and he loved it. So when I heard the advertisement for a monster truck show in Cedar Rapids, I knew Zach would be all for it.

I drug my feet on buying tickets because a)the weather in February in Iowa can suck and b)Zach's favorite, Grave Digger, would not be there. I kept an eye on the forecast and when I was fairly certain we'd be able to make it, I pulled the trigger on buying tickets. I figured correctly that Zach wouldn't really care if Grave Digger was there, as long as there were really loud trucks he'd be fine. We went with a couple friends and the 4 of us got balcony seats in the middle of the arena.
With any advance ticket purchase you get to go into the pit before the show. I thought this would be cool so we got there about 6pm for the 7:30 show. We had seen everything there was to see by 6:15. There were 6 trucks, and that's about it. We picked up some hot dogs and drinks before finding our seats at 6:45. As we walked up, I saw there was a fairly rough-looking family in our row with 6 seats separating them from the aisle. I left 2 seats between me and them, even though I knew our seats were right next to them. As luck would have it, the two people with the aisle seats did show up so I was forced to sit right next the huge patriarch of the trash family.
The first thing that hit me was the smell. This "gentleman" was in the neighborhood of 5'8" and on the light side of 3 bills. A mane of hair hung out of his dirty ball cap and he had a full, bushy beard. From the smell of him, I guessed there was probably a small woodland creature dead in his beard. Maybe something the size of a raccoon or a wolverine. Here was our first conversation as I moved next to him:
Smelly Guy: You in the wrong seats?
Me: Yeah, we were 2 seats over.
SG: Huh?
Me: We were 2 seats over.
SG: You were in the wrong seats?
Me: Yeah.

As I sat in this guy's stench zone for 30 minutes before the show started, I made a few more mental notes. The guy had finger tatoos that spelled "love" on one hand. I was fairly sure the tattoo had been done in a correctional facility. I couldn't see his other hand, but I assume is said "crak." He was also in the possession of a camera that was far too expensive. It was a nice Canon digital camera with a healthy-sized zoom lens. The group he was with (hard to tell if it was his family) consisted of a hard-looking woman who was somewhere between 40 and 70, a dim-witted boy of about 12, an older guy who looked fairly normal, and a teenage girl with multiple lip piercings.
I was hoping for very little conversation as the noise from the trucks was deafening. However, it didn't hinder my sense of smell. At one point he tried to tell me about some vehicle he had put together. I heard "350 big block", "42 inch tires", "tires squealing" and "police stop" between the roar of the engines. Shortly before intermission he decided to take off his reflective coat. It's the kind of coat highway construction workers wear. Underneath the coat was his finest XXL Bud Light t-shirt. Unfortunately, it was a couple X's too small as a few inches of hairy belly was exposed.
After intermission my new friend decided to show off his camera. He had some picture of motocross bikers doing tricks. He scrolled through a half-dozen pictures of bikers doing jumps and then got to a topless woman with a tiger hawk body painted on each breast. I made some type of approving comment, at which point he decided I needed to see the other 100 pictures of topless (and sometimes bottomless) old biker chicks. I don't think words can describe how uncomfortable I was at that point. Maybe I should have told him I wasn't comfortable looking at his amateur porn, but the guy had finger tattoos. His dimwitted son probably could have whupped me. Toward the end of the show he made some comment about the trucks being "gear drive." I nodded approvingly, as I'd done all night. Then he said "You probably don't know what that means." I thought about it and the answer seemed fairly clear that it means the truck is driven by gears. I carefully measured the risk and rewards of disputing his assumption of my mechanical knowledge and decided to let him explain it to me. Believe it or not, it means driven by gears as opposed to belt or chain driven. At that point I was really glad I had been given the opportunity to sit next to this wealth of knowledge and pornography.
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Day 7: Thanksgiving on the road

It was brought to my attention by one alert follower of this blog (the same one that also lives in my house) that I hadn't posted about the trip home. The highlight was a visit to Waffle House, if that tells you anything about how exciting the 15-hour drive home was. So without further ado...

Once again, we got off to a slow start. The ship docked early and we were at breakfast when they announced our floor could disembark. With a 15-hour drive ahead, I had hoped to be off the ship quickly to get on the road.
We hustled the kids and Gimpy through the disembarking process and got to customs behind roughly 12,000 other passengers. We got ushered to a customs line that actually moved faster than I expected, so we got on the road around 9 am.
Zach had been asking for Chicken Donald’s (McDonald’s to most people) for the entire vacation, and he finally got his wish on Thanksgiving Day. We stopped somewhere in northern Mississippi for lunch with temps in the 70’s. By the time we got to St. Louis for dinner it was below freezing and when we got home the temp was hovering around 10. My personal favorite part of the drive home was the greatest of all southern food, the Waffle House. From their picture menu for the illiterate to the insane calorie count, that place is all-around awesome. After gassing up next door to the Waffle House, we high-tailed it home and pulled into Iowa City around midnight.
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