Through the eyes of a 15 year old

[Brokenbus]

While I don't have any pictures of my kids during this trip I would like to share this story written by my then 15 year old son. Newly divorced and having my two boys for the weekend, I dragged them along as I purchased a 1967 Westy that needed it's fair share of TLC. After arriving home in Texas from our drive home from Colorado I asked Matthew if he could write a one page paper of our trip while the experience was still fresh. That 15 year old is now 24 and graduated from college this weekend. What he wrote brings me joy every time I read it. I hope you enjoy it as it means the world to me.

So this Saturday I went on a "wonderful" trip to Denver, Colorado with my dearest dad. The first thing that happened was that I didn’t have to wake up after getting only a few hours of sleep [always a plus]. After eventually dragging myself out of bed I took a shower and got ready for the day. I put on my usual pants, shirt, and stupid long sleeve collared shirt. After a short drive to the airport we walked around looking for our gate. After a while of looking, my dad deduced from the huge amount of people crowding those gates [and the huge amount of people in front of us on the Stand-by list] that we weren’t going to catch our flight. However the thought of dragging his kids around with him to places that they would rather not go to compelled him to think quickly and get us on a flight to Colorado Springs. I’ve been there once.. It was for a Boy Scout summer camp. We were starved, ran like dogs, and few of us even got a single merit badge from the whole ordeal. I’ve had bad luck with Colorado all together; in fact I had to drive home with my family in a VW bus from that state back home before. So when we finally get up to Denver my dad had problems navigating through the last few streets to the place we were trying to get to. In my father’s wisdom we tried to turn left against the traffic and through a median. However, when we finally made it through that we got to the place where the VW bus was. Now, normally the prize at the end of the tunnel should be worth it, it should be worth all the trouble and strife. This was a rather nice exception to that rule. Now, when I heard that we were driving that thing back to Texas, well my thoughts ran along these lines ‘what the hell?’ ‘Why can’t anything be easy?’ The thoughts ran off while apparently so did the condition of the bus. While it took my dad a while and a new pair of pants to get the thing working, me and my brother just made random insults at each other, since there was nothing better to do. So we were off, after returning the rental car we started off in the vehicle that was slowly starting to fall apart. For the most part it was smooth sailing until we got into Texas. There the bus really showed that it was truly worth the money that was put out for it. We started to get rained on. First a few leaks on the front window... Nothing much a few drops onto my shoe. Then through the little ventilation system in front. Soon as we knew it, we were being rained on while my brother enjoyed a nice little dry spot of the bed and was wrapped in a nice warm blanket. I was able to amuse myself with seeing how long the last sliver of battery on my I-Pod could last, and text messaging since I wasn’t able to really call anyone since the noise the bus gives off makes communication hard, then add in the fact my cell phone isn’t of high quality and you have just a small portion of why the trip wasn’t fun. So what did I do to occupy the remaining 2-4 hours of the trip? Well since music couldn’t exist in the bus, my phone was slowly dying, and to top it all off, I couldn’t read my books or study since the water from outside was leaking in more and more. So I had to avoid getting fined a hundred dollars or so by the high school. So, as the disaster of a trip was coming to a close I quickly started contacting friends and started planning. I didn’t want my weekend to be totally ruined by my dad’s junk collecting craze. So, we were finally entering Keller and what a great feeling that was. The water had stopped pouring into the bus and I the fresh Keller air was coming into the bus. When we finally got home, we had to wait for dad to get the keys to the garage out of his backpack. Because the garage door opener was in the car that we drove to the airport in. Which will raise the following question: How the heck would one get the car back? Since it would take a car to get there, and a car going back. Unless one gets another driver to drive you there, it is nearly impossible. One could always pull a Multiple Man and defy physics by being in two places at once, but how often does an actual mutant ‘X’ gene occur in real life? However, that was my "wonderful" trip to and from the "great" state of Colorado.