Now Playing: Santa Barbara & the Dick Beaters

"I'm squeezing it as tight as I can!"

Those are the words I usually (a) love to say and (b) love to hear. But those aren't exactly the words I want to hear from my son as we try to make our way over Donner Pass after being in a car for eight hours. You see, during our four-day trip from Nevada to Half Moon Bay to Sunnyvale to Santa Barbara to San Francisco and back ... The Boy who normally does not eat, consumed actual food. Food and tootsie pops. And now with the closest rest stop two miles away, The Boy's body has decided to say AhhHellNo. This is after one previous stop where I had to toss his briefs into the women's tampon disposal. Sorry 'bout that Marie Callender's employees but Miss Spoken doesn't like to hold shitty underpants in her purse while sipping on your godawful house Chardonnay. Actually, Miss Spoken can't think of a time when she likes to hold on to crappy underpants.

Anyfeces.....

We made it home without The Boy blowing up Johnny Boy's car and having to ride into Reno as a hood ornament. That's almost never fun when it happens to you.  Almost.

The trip was worth every mile spent twisting my 5'10 frame around to rip toys from one offspring to another, push batteries back where they belong, create makeshift pillows from blankets using one hand and threatening bodily injury to my Brat Pack.

And for those taking a trip to Santa Barbara, you have to stay at the Lemon Tree Inn. Salt water pool, balconies for every room and Bloody Marys on site. Leadbetter Beach is also a great spot to barbecue, roll down hills and fall in the ocean. If you get there early enough, as Kick Ass Corrina did, you might even get the chance to ear-hustle on a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Stay late enough and you can watch the homeless, twackers, my dad nonconformists create spatulas out of beer cans because they don't want to use their "dick beaters."

This will probably be my last trip of the year. Miss Spoken is tired of road trips even if she's not the one doing the driving. She is the one doing the drinking and cursing and that my friends can be done in Babbleville.

P.S. Corrina ..... The Boy sends hearts and love and kisses and sexual harassment.

Destination: Santa Barbara!

So we're out of here. All except Legal. I'm going to try not to freak out over the fact that she's here alone, if alone means under surveillance. Miss Perceived lives next door and has been given authorization to kick ass when necessary or at least when fun. And Grandma is five minutes away and will be doing the Drop-In-And-See-If-You're-Drunk-Or-Having-Sex thing. Grandpa can remove his belt with one mighty tug and has also been given authorization to impose corporal punishment.

She'll be fine, right? 

Gigantic Fuckup - Part Dos

Remember my Gigantic Fuckup when I booked two rooms at the Days Inn for September 11 instead of September 18 because I'm an idiot who makes lots of organizing checklists, can scramble eggs with her toes while doing the dishes and simultaneously spreading joy throughout the land but can't seem to read a calendar?  

Yeah.

Well, to my relief they waived that pesky 48 hour cancellation requirement and put the cash back in my account.  Wheeeeewww. Close one.

Then came Part Two of the previously mentioned Gigantic Fuckup. It appeared as though the entire hamlet known as Santa Barbara was booked solid. Ass face! I'm pretty sure there isn't a holiday that weekend but then again, how the hell would I know since I can't read a calendar. Just as I was giving in to despair, I found not one, but TWO rooms available at the Sandyland Reef Inn in Carpinteria which sounds like a warehouse full of area rugs made by Middle Eastern orphans with bloody carpet weaving fingers but is really a town just 9 miles from Santa Barbara. Perfect! I book the rooms and decide to find some more photos of this slice of Eden because with a name like Sandyland ... it has to be good. I'm picturing sand and surf and daiquiris and coconut oil and Frankie Avalon making time with Annette Funicello

Instead, what I find is this:

Oooohhhh, and some of this:

Along with a stream of warnings like Don't Stay Here! What a Dump! Got Infected Here! Don't Forget Your Crack Pipe! So ... I promptly cancel yet another reservation, pull out two thirds of my hair, throw something solid across the room and declare this trip O-V-E-R.

That is until my girl Corrina emailed the words that made me pull my thumb out of my mouth and uncurl myself from the fetal position:  

The Lemon Tree Inn

(Insert God-like light from above followed by Herald Angels singing) 

Queen beds, swimming pool, onsite restaurant and wait for it ..... wait for it ..... an onsite bar.

Trip back on!

What Do Cannibalism and Miss Spoken Have In Common?

Donner Memorial State Park

Where else would the residents of Babbleville decide to pitch tents and expose themselves to the elements? Ya'll know your history, right? Here are Miss Spoken's cliff notes for those who were smoking pot in the sixth grade:

It was the winter of 1846 when some hardboiled emigrants tried to make their way to California via the Sierra Nevada mountains. Cue blizzards, human suffering, exhaustion, starvation, frostbite and cannibalization of the dead. Forty-one deaths, forty-six survivors.

Alright. Now that that's out of the way let's cut to modern day times where Miss Spoken and Miss Perceived, along with our party of thrill-seeking campers, are making our way to the very spot where this great American tragedy occurred.

That's when all hell breaks lose in my covered wagon.

With Johnny Boy at the reins, I'm looking over our reservations when it occurs to me that our reservations are for September 11 which means today is September 11 which means that I made a Gigantic Fuck Up when I booked two rooms at the Days Inn in Santa Barbara for September 11 when they should have been for September 18! Ugh!! I could vomit, I might vomit but either way I'm certainly going to cry or punch myself in the face because those rooms cost me almost $400 and I missed the 48 hour cancellation time and I'm freaking the fuckmesideways out when Legal alerts me to the fact that The Boy has a bloody nose. I look in the backseat and there is blood everywhere. It's a hyrdrant. Legal deftly whips the cover off her pillow and stops the river that is my son's blood. One disaster averted, I make about 40 desperate calls to my mom who is always home but for some reason isn't today but needs to be so she can call the Days Inn, pretend to be me and weave some bullshit story that gets me my money back.

Once this Babbleville Party makes it to Donner, things get better. I'm able to reach my mom and The Boy isn't dead. We unload fourteen days worth of survival goods for our two night stay. This cache of riches includes things like sleeping bags, crayons, bats, Xanax, etc. The tents go up, the beer goes down and the kids already look homeless and hungry.

Always the paradox, Miss Perceived pulls out flavored vodka (girlie, right?) but then drinks it straight out of tin cup (manly, right). Legal probably takes one too many pulls from the bottle because the next morning she is dry heaving behind our tent. And because I'm a caring kind of mom, I pat her on the back before I tell her to take her ass deeper into the woods because the last thing I want is that Thug Gang of Chipmunks, that has been circling our site, to get all crazy drunk with her undigested Smirnoff Citrus Vodka. Nobody wants to see boozy chipmunks fist-fighting their brothers and having regrettable sex. Not only that, but this is Bear Country. Bears. Hence the metal bear-resistant food lockers and the warnings not to keep toothpaste in your tent. 

This second day also brought on a game of hide-and-go-seek in which Johnny Boy got caught like a three-toed sloth half way up a tree and Miss Perceived proved that she could haul ass. My gay brother kept trying to get everybody to go see the beaver dam which of course led to many a joke about beavers of the vagina kind. So much so that Legal declared us disgusting. Cause we are. And we love talking about vaginas.

I continued my trend of fucking up greatly when, as I prepared to make our traditional breakfast of french toast and sausage, I realized that I had forgotten to pack the butter, the sausage and oh yeah, the freakin' eggs. And at dinner, I realized I forgot ketchup and mustard for the hotdogs and hamburgers. Unlike the Donner Party 163 years before us, the Babbleville Party was able to remedy my clusterfuck by saddling up for the Safeway ten minutes away. Plus, we got more of this for Miss Perceived:

Miss Spoken likes her ladies liquored up.

Don't Ever Shine Your Light In the Shit Hole

And so our short lived yet fun filled camping trip is over. Sob.

After spending three weeks making lists that would prepare me for this "simple" three day excursion into the wild, another two days putting those lists into action and one afternoon (the actual afternoon that we were scheduled to leave) putting two new tires on the jeep, me and my fellow campers were ready to hit some kind of dusty trail.

The cast of characters:

G -  aka Me, Mom, Gina. I'll also answer to Dirty Little Slut and She Who Is Awesome.

Camping Skill Level:  Moderate

Other Qualities: Camp Out Culinary Arts and Fireside Mixology

Uncle Johnny - aka Johnny Boy, JB, He Who Has Much Luck

Camping Skill Level: Somewhere between Eagle Scout and the Discovery Channel

Other Qualifications: Enlarged sense of humor and almost 2'000 songs on his IPod 

Uncle Will - aka Puppet Boy, Geek Squad

Camping Skill Level: Moderate (just because his Dad ran over himself during a camping trip doesn't make Will an idiot, too.)

Other Qualities: Woodland Creature Whisperer

Mark - aka John, My Gay, Harlowe's Boy, My Brother's Boyfriend

Camping Skill Level: Absolutely none, zero, zilch

Other Qualities: Can drink 24 beers in an afternoon and likes to dance after doing such

The Boy - aka my son Maximus, Thing One, Frick, Clyde

Camping Skill Level: One trip under his belt and likes to take a piss in the great wide open

Other Qualifications:  He's a Sevedge boy who loves fire 

Devil Girl - aka my daughter Harlowe, Thing Two, Frack, Bonnie

Camping Skill Level: One trip under her belt as well as one dramatic fall into an icy river while fishing

Other Qualifications: She's a Sevedge girl who can bench press her own weight

Tents and sleeping bags: check. Random camping supplies such as a wine opener: check. Three days worth of nourishment and spirits: double check. On we go.... headed just past the Nevada State Line and into Cali Country.

Day One: Set up camp and within five minutes are hit with a slight thunderstorm and some rain. Perfect opportunity to take a hike to an empty lake bed and scout out where to pitch our shade tent and cooler the next day, right? Right. Also of note: the campers right across from us could have been filming an Abercrombie & Fitch ad. Bare chested twenty something metro-sexual boys passing a football to each other while swigging lite beer and rocking scarves. Yeah. Later that evening My Gay decides to shine his flashlight down into the deep and unforgiving cavern known as the Men's Vaulted Toilet. He is still visibly shaken from that experience. 

Day Two: Packed like mules, we make the quarter mile hike to Stampede Reservoir. We are four adults and two children strapped from tip to toe with folding chairs, a folding table, a shade tent, two inflatable rafts (already inflated), water toys, land toys, beach towels, cameras, music and maybe 50 pounds of beer, wine and Capri Suns all packed into one fabulous cube-shaped cooler on wheels. Later that day and back at camp, we had a very large deer walk right through our camp site and up to our tables (thanks Woodland Creature Whisperer). Max turned into some kind of Uber-Fire-God once the camp fire was lit. He kept doing some kind of primitive tribal dance while dressed in his Wall-E pajamas. It was kind of disturbing yet wildly entertaining and he also developed a fondness for the local water spiket. Harlowe built rock formations and architectural phenomenons out of river rock and twigs. Day Two also included three adults (one sober, the other two not so much), attempting to scare the shit out of first-time camper Mark by jumping out of the woods half-naked wearing a Chewbacca mask while being filmed by yours truly. The night ended with much bigger thunderstorms, lots of rain and four shots of Wild Turkey in honor of Seltar.

This trip was so worth the dust, the dirt and the peeing in the wild at 3:00 in the morning that we will be doing it all over again come September. But the next time ..... I'm taking along my saucy neighbor and her three year old son. Bring on Chewbacca!

Move'em Out, Head'em Up!

I'm outta here, y'all!

I'm packing up the wagons and taking Devil Girl and The Boy to Stampede Reservoir for three days and two nights of some good ol'fashioned camping.

The Agenda:

* Dirt

* Drinks

* Swimming

* Smores

* And watching Uncle Johnny sport his Chewbacca mask to scare the crap out of my brother's boyfriend who has never been camping .... ever.

Destination: Disneyland!

We're back!  

Together, we survived almost 20 hours in a car and another 24 on foot all for the experience of our first family vacation to Disneyland.

The trip was ridiculously perfect.  Nobody peed their pants (or worse), the number of tears spilled could fill a tablespoon and we came home with the same number of people that we left with.  Not too bad for this clan o'mine.  We were able to hit up both parks from opening to closing and my kids went on every ride that they were tall enough to get on, even the Tower of Terror!  Their Dad would have been so proud of them -- real soldiers.  Oddly enough, the only thing they didn't want to do was meet the Disney characters themselves.  But if I thought they were real, I probably wouldn't be too thrilled with a pair of six foot tall chipmunks making their way towards me either.

As my son would say, it was "Awesome, Awesome, Awe-Some!"  And I was able to learn some things about my family, too.  I learned that my little ones are just as crazy as their Dad was, that Sage can be trusted to use the gas station bathroom by herself without skipping out and hitching a ride to San Francisco, that Auntie Stacey is Harlowe's new best friend ever and that my brother-in-law deserves a Get Into Heaven Free card for being the man behind the wheel for the entire trip.  Thanks Johnny Boy!

Leave a Message at the Beep!

I'm out of here until May 6th getting makeup and anger management tips from my idol, Maleficent.  See ya!!

Countdown to Disneyland!

On May 2nd, my brother-in-law Johnny and I are piling my 4, 5 and 17 year old into a rental car and making the 12-hour drive to see Auntie Stacey and friends in Southern California .  This will be our first family vacation ever, but it's bittersweet.  May 2nd would also have been my husband Seltar's  38th birthday. Heavy sigh....

Seltar always wanted to take the kids to Disneyland but we could just never afford it.  So, when he suddenly passed away eight months ago after an accident at work, it didn't take Johnny and I long to decide to do this in his honor.  Plus, we could all use a great big heaping spoonful of "The Happiest Place on Earth."   This will be Max and Harlowe's first trip to Disneyland and they've already scoped out their favorite rides -- Buzz Lightyear, Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion (we'll see if they survive that one).  It also happens to be the Food and Wine Weekend but cross my heart, I didn't know that when I booked the trip.

So the countdown has begun and is posted enthusiastically right smack in the middle of our fridge:    5  Days!