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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Day 6: The gales of November came early

Ok, so the gales of November weren’t really early since our cruise was in November. However, it was really windy and I’ll take any chance I get to quote Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Cozumel back to Mobile was rough enough that the staff hung up barf bags around the common area, especially by the elevators. As I had been doing the entire trip, I continued to self-medicate to fend off motion sickness. I was fairly successful at this. We spent a good portion of the day on the deck enjoying our last full day of warm weather until June. We took in one of the below-average production shows that night. Maybe I expect too much, but I think a cruise ship should be able to do better than a junior high talent show. The girls said good-bye to the friend they had made and exchanged addresses with her. They had lost the address by the time we got home and we haven’t seen any mail from her. So go vacation friendships. We went to bed early and plotted out how we were going to get up early, grab breakfast and be ready to disembark the second our floor was called. At least that was my plan. Read more on this article...

Day 5: Cozumel

We got off to a bad start. Our plan was to get off the boat as soon as it docked and catch a cab to the park where we had reservations for the girls to swim with dolphins. We couldn’t get off the boat when we wanted because another boat was docking. When we finally got off, Abby got wrangled by some guy dressed in aboriginal garb for a picture. A real man would have grabbed his fake spear and beat him with it. Being a lesser man, I just complain about it in a blog. We found the taxi stand and had to take 2 cabs to the park as there wasn’t a van available for the 6 of us. When we got to the park, the cabby “conveniently” didn’t have change. I made him wait for our other cab and got exact change, as opposed to way over-tipping. We got into the park and made our way to the dolphin experience, where we discovered our reservation was for 2 days later. We momentarily panicked, but the customer service person let us change the reservation to that day at 1pm. We had a couple hours to kill, so we hung out in the pool. Cozumel turned out to be the best part of the vacation by far. Zach really enjoyed the pool as it wasn’t crowded like the ship’s pool. The girls loved the dolphin experience and I took some crappy amateur video of it. They charged me $5 to be on the pier near the dolphins, which was cheap compared to the $75 it would have cost for their video. We wandered around the park for awhile and checked out the scuba area and the beach. We didn’t spend much time there as the boat leaves the dock at 5pm and we needed to do some shopping. I take that back, there was nothing we needed. Just a lot of stuff we wanted. Shopping at Cozumel was more pleasant than Progreso because the harassment was more low-key. However, the prices were a lot higher. I’m not exactly sure what we left Cozumel with, I think the girls got sun dresses and Zach was the big winner with a green turkey made out of a gourd (I’m not making that up). We got back to the boat in plenty of time, unlike some of our fellow passengers that had to get called a few times. Read more on this article...

Day 4: Progreso (not the spaghetti sauce)

By the time we got to Progreso, we were more than ready to get off the boat. The pier is 5 miles long for absolutely no reason at all, so you have to ride a bus to get to the city. I had done some research on Progreso so I had some idea what it would be like. I told the kids to stay close and ignore the harassing vendors. I was surprised and more than a bit annoyed by the vendors. Our goal was to go to the beach, and on the way we were constantly getting stopped. We stepped into a restaurant for a drink and vendors came to our table and tried to sell us crap. The restaurant owner/manager told us not to give the vendors any money, but never kicked them out of his restaurant. To cap it off, he tried to charge me for a drink we ordered but never received.

After our brief stop at the restaurant, we continued to the beach. It was, by far, the dirtiest beach I have ever seen. It’s a good thing you can buy penicillin over the counter in Mexico, because after being on the beach for awhile I felt an infection coming on. We walked down the beach for awhile and a guy that works for a restaurant on the beach offered us a table for $10. He said he’d bring some chips and salsa and we could get some drinks. It seemed acceptable, we were going to need a place to put our stuff and it provided some shade. Of course, we never saw the guy again. I don’t know if the tables actually belonged to the restaurant or if he really worked there. If that had happened to me in the states, I probably would have done something about it. Instead, I just chalked it up as a learning experience. And naturally, we still got harassed by vendors.
The same guy that tried to sell us balloon animals in the restaurant tried his luck with us again. People were selling t-shirts, bootleg DVD’s, kites, cloths, cigars, small children, hypodermic needles, herpes and massages. And yes, the herpes and massages go hand in hand. We hung out at the beach for a couple hours before heading back to the market to catch the smelly bus back to the boat.
On the way back, we stopped at some guys tent (I’m not making that up, it was a tent) who was selling jewelry. He first had to prove it was real shells and not cheap plastic jewelry by trying to light it on fire (Again, this really happened.) He wanted $25, here’s the conversation the followed:
Pyromaniac vendor: $25 for the necklace
Abby: I’ll give you $10
Pyro: $20. It’s real shells, didn’t you notice it didn’t start on fire?
Abby: $10
Pyro: $15
Abby: $10
Pyro: $13
Abby: Deal.
Pyro: How about $20 for two non-flammable necklaces?

Abby looks to her sister to see if she wants a necklace for $10, she says no so Abby buys one for $13. I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of her. She stood her ground in the face of a flamethrower and when he tried to sweeten the deal by adding the 2nd necklace, she refused. She only wanted one necklace, and that’s what she got. I could give a short dissertation on opportunity cost now, but I don’t want to lose my 11-member audience. I’m pretty sure her and I are the only members of the family that would have done that. Gimpy would have walked away from the tent with 40 necklaces.
We wandered around the market and bought a couple more cheap souviniers. Zach got a t-shirt and we bought some flammable necklaces at the bargain basement price of 6 for $5.
We caught the stinky bus back to the boat and had a great sit-down meal that night. Our waitress was awesome, probably the best service we encountered the entire trip.
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Day 3:A Day at Sea

I started the day by browsing through the cruise guide in our room. That was when I realized every member of our party would be assessed a gratuity fee of $10/day. Being the cheapskate I am, I was a little pissed. I'm pretty sure my 3-year-old isn't going to require enough assistance from the staff to cost them $10/day.
What I remember specifically about our first full day at sea was the wife and our middle child feeling the ill-effects of motion sickness. They both took some medication and did a fair amount of sleeping that day. I wandered around the boat a lot and started feeling a little claustrophobic. The ship seems huge from the outside, but if you walk around for an hour you can see everything with a half hour to spare. The kids and I played mini-golf, which is a bit frustrating on a boat. The mini-golf course is on the top level with nothing blocking the gale force winds coming off the gulf. It's literally windy enough to blow the ball around the course.

The dining room was formal attire that night, so we opted for the buffet again. I couldn't believe how many people dressed up to eat. My vacation attire is strictly shorts and t-shirts, not suit and tie. And, of course, the staff took plenty of pictures of people in their formal attire to sell them at ridiculous profits.
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Day 2: Arrival

Staying in Tupelo left us with about a 4.5 hour drive to Mobile. We got up, had breakfast, had a slight miscommunication with Gimpy about when we’d depart, then we got on the road. We arrived in Mobile with time to spare, which was good because Mobile doesn’t believe in signage. We had directions, but once you can see the boat you’d expect to be able to drive right to it. Not the case. At all. We missed the turn the first time, looped back around, went under the bay twice, made a U-turn, visited Cuba, before finally finding the parking ramp.

There was a huge line to get into the ramp as every car is stopped and sniffed by the police dog. Good thing they weren’t looking for prescriptions or Gimpy would still be getting searched. We dropped off our bags and got yelled at because we hadn’t attached our tags yet. These were the paper tags so they know where to send your bags on the boat. If I were in the mood for an argument, I would have asked why we would attach said tags before we got there. We travelled 900 miles and spent the night on the way. If we had attached paper tags before we left, they would have definitely been torn off by the time we arrived. And then we almost left our passports in the suitcases. That would have made clearing customs excessively difficult.
Getting on a cruise ship requires waiting in endless lines. There were only 2000 passengers on the ship, yet there were at least 8000 people in line. However, we were fortunate that my wife likes spending my money. She paid extra to be on the top level, so we got VIP treatment. We went through a short security line while 8000 people shot us angry looks. Gimpy set off the metal detectors with her knees, but they took it easy on her despite me telling them she was carrying. We also had to go through a health screening, which is a colossal waste of time. You fill out a form saying if you’re sick, and if you are they make you go to the medical station on the ship. So everyone claims to be healthy and tries to hide their smallpox. We got our badges/room keys/charge cards (DON’T LOSE THESE OR WE THROW YOU OVERBOARD!!!) and headed on board. But not before they had to take our picture. Then we went up the ramps and got on board, where each person gets their picture taken individually. This is a recurring theme (in case you hadn’t noticed) that Carnival really likes taking your picture. Then they try to sell you your picture at a ridiculous profit.
We went to find something to eat (it was about 2pm and we hadn’t eaten lunch) and settled for the outdoor deli near the pool. We did the throw-a-bunch-of-crap-in-a-bowl stir fry (similar to Hu Hot or Genghis Grill) with below average results, but we were starving so it didn’t really matter. We hung out on the deck for awhile before I went to find a TV to watch the Hawks (SPOILER ALERT: they lost in gut-wrenching fashion again). The first place I went agreed to change one of the 3 TVs to the Iowa game (all 3 were on the LSU game) and they gave me the one where it appeared there was an earthquake in Iowa City. He also informed me there was a lounge a level below. I took the hint and went downstairs, there another aloof bartender changed one 4 inch TV to the Iowa game while the 2 96 inch TVs were still on, you guessed it, the LSU game. She also sold me a $6 glass of beer (17% gratuity included). Then they turned it off after 15 minutes because everyone had to go listen to the safety briefing. Lots of irate LSU fans after that.
I know the cool kids skip the safety briefing, but apparently kids need to attend to get wristbands directing them where to go if the ship sinks. Once again, DON’T LOSE THESE OR WE THROW YOU OVERBOARD!!! After the safety briefing, I wasn’t interested in going back to the bar so I went to our room and watched the rest of the game there. We hit the buffet for dinner, then wandered around for awhile before calling it a night. Zach went to the kids club and seemed to like it (he wasn’t one of the kids bawling uncontrollably when I picked him up) while the girls met a girl named Jamie to hang out with for the rest of the trip. And Jamie, if you're reading this, the girls lost your home address so don't expect any correspondence from them. Also, if you're reading this, it's an amazing coincidence and you probably need a better hobby than wandering through the blogosphere.
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