Escaping as quickly as they can from a getaway weekend gone bad.
I stumbled upon this little gem tonight, which probably explains my weekend pretty well.
Though, I should say right away - I really enjoyed my weekend. Just not in the way I anticipated enjoying it.
Sunday was my friend Lance's birthday. We have this group of 4 - 2 guys, 2 girls - we call 'the Family.' We're always scheduling Family dinners, and Family get-togethers. We used to gather as a Family to watch the hot new drama, Revenge. It was our thing.
Revenge is off for the Summer, but we still like to get together as a family when we can.
So for Lance's birthday, he really wanted the Family to go to Busch Gardens, the World's most beautiful park (their words, not mine; insert on-going weekend joke here). It's about 3 hours away (4 with traffic...which we definitely hit), so I suggested we leave Friday night, to avoid me getting motion sick before I even got on any rides. Lance works for a hotel, so we got a sweet deal on the hotel, and so it seemed like a no-brainer to do this.
Get there Friday night, enjoy a restful night, start at the park early and go ALL. DAY. LONG. Go home somewhat late-ish, but not too late Saturday night. We do have 8am church to get to Sunday, after all.
After an eventful drive down to Williamsburg, VA (where the world's most beautiful park is located), which involved a stop at Chic-fil-a on a day when they were offering free meals to people dressed up like cows - a lot of people in Fredricksburg, VA, got free entrees, I can tell you that - and a stop at a rest stop with a sweet LOVE sculpture that we of course posed around for a picture (picture will have to come later), we finally made it to our hotel and planned to promptly fall asleep.
That plan worked pretty well for 2 people in the group. I was not one of them. I forget that I don't really sleep well in new places right away, and that Chic-fil-a was not sitting the best with me anyway, so I woke up every 2 hours or so...which isn't all that restful, turns out. The other guy in our group also didn't sleep well - he had to deal with a cover stealer in his bed, which is never fun. The other 2 slept beautifully though, so at least someone got to enjoy my fabulous idea of getting there the night before.
Long story short - which means I just talked too much about the parts of the trip that were the least meaningful, and now I'm going to skimp on the actual substance of the weekend...oops! - Saturday morning came and I was tired, my friend Eric was tired and crabby, and when we got to the park, we found out the rides were all stopped because of lightning in the area! We knew there was a chance of storms in the afternoon, but apparently the storms were not content to wait around for us to enjoy a morning of rides. They had to come early! It was still sunny, but we could hear thunder, so it seemed like they were getting close.
We walked around for a few minutes before Eric and I, the 2 sleepy ones, convinced the other 2 that we should leave and hit up the outlet mall nearby while we wait and see if the storms would just roll past quickly. We could come back in the afternoon if that was the case, and we wouldn't be sitting around doing nothing all morning.
As we got back to the parking lot, giant raindrops started falling from the sky, fast and furious. The sunny sky was gone in 60 seconds (yeah that's right, to car-action movies referenced in a row! Boom!), and it was suddenly pouring bathtub-sized raindrops down on us. It was amazing. I thought I was going to drown in each raindrop that hit me. I dove into Lance's car after running through the rain, which felt both terrifying and exhilarating. I felt like a child.
Anyway, we enjoyed the outlets for the rest of the morning (yay for good sales!), thought at one point that it was going to clear up enough for the rides to start up again, then changed our minds when it started pouring again.
We went to lunch at a place called the Cheese shop, a cute little pretentious shop that wine connoisseurs and elitist William & Mary law students probably frequent often, and we almost got struck by lightning as we ran through the parking lot to the shop (hyperbole here, of course - but the thunder clap that hit as we ran was eerily close and uber-loud).
We topped lunch off with a delicious rolo mcflurry at McDonalds - I may be addicted to those, as I've had about 4 of them in the last month...yikes - as we tried to waste some more time before the 3 of us convinced Lance that his wonderful optimism about that dime-sized spot of blue sky in the distance was not likely to be enough to get the rides at the world's most beautiful park to start up again. I was tired, Eric was cranky, and Kaitlyn had a sore throat - none of us were going to last much longer, and no one wanted to stay in that town sitting around until 9pm on the off-chance we could ride one ride and then get home at 1am...maybe we're getting old, but we just didn't have the endurance for it.
We finally convinced Lance that it was probably a better idea to go home then - and it turns out, it was a good idea. Even at 4pm, we hit a good amount of traffic going home. And about 90 minutes into the drive, Lance acknowledged we were probably right about it not clearing up enough for the rides to start soon - since we were currently experiencing heavy rains with a flash flood warning in a neighboring town. We were glad he could finally come to grips with it.
Don't worry everyone, we made it home safely! And happily - I think some of my favorite road trips of late have been in Lance's car. Kid knows how to keep the jams flowing and the dance party rocking. (*don't worry Chris and Ben, I said most, not all, because your road trips were stellar!!). But I walked into my house and I'm pretty sure I fell asleep not terribly long after.
At any rate, it wasn't the weekend trip we planned, but I still had so much fun with the Family. I love a good family bonding, and this was great. We celebrated Lance's birthday with some other friends Sunday night, but the 4 of us were feeling exceptionally close, and I loved that feeling.
But that picture above (courtesy of Story People - I love them so much!) sure felt like Saturday around 3:30pm, I tell you what.
And that was my weekend vacation that didn't turn out quite as planned. Good thing I don't often make a plan for myself with vacations - it's easier to adapt when the plan doesn't go as, um, planned. 3 cheers for laziness!
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