That Awkward Time Between Christmas and New Year
After leaving Las Vegas, we began the drive to Middle of Nowhere, Utah. My two cousins and aunt and uncle all live in LA, and we all decided to meet up this year to make merry in a remote cabin near Zion National Park. Despite my mother's promise that the drive from Las Vegas to Zion was only about two hours, we ended up taking four to complete the trip, with exactly two stops in between. Before heading out, however, we had determined that we needed to make a shopping trip for the week, because we were driving up on Christmas Day (when NOTHING is open, be it run by Christians or dirty heathens), and grocery stores around Zion are few and far between. Due to Utah's Prohibition-esque liquor laws (nothing over 3.2% alcohol content can be sold anywhere except in state or Native American run liquor stores. That's wine coolers and light beers, folks), we decided we needed to stock up on alcohol as well.
Now, far be it from me to say that my family is full of lushes, but we certainly like our wine (and beer/champagne/martinis/cognac/rum/white russians, etc.), so it was imperative for a five day cabin stay that we have a selection of drunk makings for the evenings. Because Nevada is awesome, the local Sam's Club had a beautiful selection of wines and liquor, and we decided that seven bottles of wine, three bottles of champagne, a handle of Svedka, and a bottle of Hennessey was more than enough for five days. And by we I mean my parents and grandmother, because I go to college and know very well that that much alcohol between seven decently sized drinkers won't last three nights unless they're Methodists. This is why I always drink with Methodists. More for me.
We bought a ton of food at Sam's but still needed non-bulk items so we braved the horrific corporate hell that is Wal-Mart for things like butter and bread. Being fed up at this point, I offered to be the sentinel and guard the alcohol while my family went in for yet another shopping trip. Our little rental car was absolutely brand new, and it had an alarm system that we weren't used to, so after my father locked the doors and left and I opened the door to help my grandmother find us again (she got sick of Wal-Mart too), the alarm system started freaking out. An interesting note about alarm systems: absolutely no one gives a shit. At all. Unless you're black or wearing a hoodie (neither of which applied to me at the time), when people see your alarm going off they come over to either laugh at you or try to help, both of which happened to be in abundance as the alarm went crazy. After like ten minutes, my parents finally came back out and hit the Shut Up Button on the remote. We managed to somehow fit all of that alcohol, four people's worth of luggage for over a week, AND groceries for five days into a cute little Ford Escape (God, we really abused that car over the coming days), and set off into the desert. Rather soon outside of Vegas we came upon a roadside correctional facility with a billboard that said, "Caution. Potential Escaped Prisoners." Queue creepy urban legend.
After a rather uneventful trip, we came upon the entrance to beautiful Zion. Now, I wouldn't cross my grandmother in a very large array of situations (most of them involving public service charges or late food at a restaurant), but that car ride through Zion absolutely owned her. Between screams of "Oh my God we're going to die!" from my grandmother and "Oh my God it's SOOO GORGEOUS!" from my mother (equally obnoxious when repeated ad nauseam), I made it through to the other side of the park with most of my hair still firmly in my scalp. A feat, I think, that deserves some sort of reward.
We made it to our beautiful cabin on a mountain, exhausted after a long drive and ready to relax. Now, it's important to remember that while my family is great at a lot of things, figuring out new technology is not one of them. This job usually falls to me because I'm the college student (if I'd have known that "You're supposed to be smart, you go to Yale" was going to be the bane of my existence every time the Internet stopped working, I might have reconsidered. Or pretended to go deaf. Something logical like that.). When we got to the house, we followed the instructions about getting into the garage with the code provided (fancy!), and I figured the next logical step was to open the one and only door in the garage to get into the house. This was a horrible mistake. An alarm immediately began piercing the pristine mountain calm, and shutting the door again did nothing to sate its thirst for audible destruction. The worst part, however, was that the stupid fucking door led to...the outside again. Not into the cabin at all. WHY would you build two doors from the exact same place to lead into the exact same place? And how the hell were we going to get into the house? We also weren't even entirely sure that this was the right place, so we might have been setting off the alarm in some poor person's house for no reason. Oh, and aren't cops supposed to show up when house alarms go off?
After a lot of mad scrambling and pressure on me to figure out what the hell was going on, we magically figured everything out and finally settled into a nice quiet evening filled with wine and Mormon jokes. The next day we made it into Zion for a hike to the most incredible waterfall I've ever seen in person. The water crashing was so loud it sounded like thunder, and the freezing spray made the Yale/Harvard football game of 2008 seem like a trip to the fucking Bahamas. It was excellent. We made it back to our cabin without incident to wait for the rest of my family. So we waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, we decided that since we had neither cell phone service nor internet, we would do as we were advised by the owner of the cabin and steal Wi-Fi from the Thunderbird Motel parking lot in the bustling, five building town of Mt. Carmel. I say "we" but I really mean my parents, since I reasoned that (A) No matter how little faith you old people may have in my generation, even iPhone users aren't on Facebook ALL the time, so a wall post is a long shot, and (B) If they'd been lost this whole time, they were bound to show up as soon as my parents left for the internet pirating.
Guess who was right? Yep. They showed up about twenty minutes after my parents left, along with their two tiny dogs . The next day we set out to explore the bustling metropolis of Nowhere, Utah. Bearing in mind that no police officers had come to arrest us during the alarm system debacle, and none of us had actually seen a police station among the five buildings of Mount Carmel, our curiosities were piqued when we noticed a police cruiser parked on the side of the road-a seeming speed trap. However, the piquing continued when, hours later, we noticed that it was still there, unmoved, with the officer sitting in the exact same position. Then we realized the horrifying truth.
The police officer was a fucking mannequin.
Have you ever seen House of Wax? Either the old one or the one where Paris Hilton gets a spike rammed through her head? Because that's definitely worth seeing, just so you know. The premise is that people have car trouble, so they walk to this town for help. Everything seems fine except there's no one on the streets. They peek into a church and see that everyone's in there, at a service, so they go into this wax museum to pass the time until everyone gets out and they can ask for help. This is, of course, incredibly unrealistic, I mean what town has an absolute 100% churchgoing record? I live in the Bible Belt and that shit just doesn't happen, no matter how many fanatics you know. Anyway. They realize that the wax statues look incredibly convincing, and they get creeped out because wax museums are creepy, and blah blah blah they finally realize that everyone in the town is actually made of wax and there's a crazy guy who waxed them all and he wants to kill and wax the newcomers and Chad Michael Murray is a horrible actor but God he's attractive.
So now we knew that we were actually living in the House of Wax town, a fact that was only made worse by our accidental visit to a taxidermy museum (there were reindeer to pet outside and we had to go through the museum to get to them. It was so horrifying.). So we were in the middle of nowhere, with no cell phone service, grocery stores, or police around. Queue the insane snowstorm. We got like two feet in one day and one night, which led to rather competitive snow fort building and delicious hot chocolate. But as they say, it's all fun and games until you have to get your grandmother back to the airport so you freak out and try to drive cars that aren't meant to go in snow and end up causing hundreds of dollars in damages to a Prius and relying on the friendly but outwardly terrifying locals to get you back to your cabin after making an emergency grocery store/snow chains run. They do say that, right?
In between all this drama, I also managed to injure my foot during the pressingly important process of running up stairs to get towels to clean up a wine spilling, causing pretty intense pain and ruining my chances of getting to experience one of the things I'd been looking forward to the most: Vegas for New Year's. My parents managed to have a good time though, and my dad got wasted and won $175 by playing with a Blackjack strategy that didn't actually exist because he read the strategy guide wrong. This is awesome.
Being in Vegas requires the ability to move around, so we decided that renting a wheelchair for me was the best option. I spent an entire day living the life of a paraplegic, and I have to say, it's fascinating. I like my legs a lot, and I obviously think that it would be horrible long term, but for a day I got to cut huge lines, have tons of free champagne because the bartenders were too afraid to card me, and watch people try really hard to figure out what happened to me, their shocked silence speaking volumes when my mother steered me around in circles, laughing maniacally, and my father shoved me into a corner backwards on the most crowded elevator I have ever been on, also laughing maniacally. Classy. The day ended with my watching Jersey Shore for the first time and weeping openly for my generation. Weirdest New Year's Day ever.
We stayed in town a bit longer, and between seeing the naked Cirque Du Soleil, winning $40 illegally at a slot machine, and thinking I was locked out of our room for a full 20 minutes, sitting outside forlornly while a drunk Italian guy shouted into a cell phone next to me in the hall, only to find out that I was on the entirely wrong floor, I started to miss home. I have a borderline unhealthy dependence on constant animal fuzziness, and the desert was beginning to make me look like a native Floridian after years of sun abuse. We made it back in one piece, I went to see Tron (in which the main character looks strikingly like a mashup of two of my more serious exes), and I came back to Yale ready to do a lot of work and be all studious and whatnot. All in all, I'd say my holidays were pretty boring. How were yours?
T.
Now, far be it from me to say that my family is full of lushes, but we certainly like our wine (and beer/champagne/martinis/cognac/rum/white russians, etc.), so it was imperative for a five day cabin stay that we have a selection of drunk makings for the evenings. Because Nevada is awesome, the local Sam's Club had a beautiful selection of wines and liquor, and we decided that seven bottles of wine, three bottles of champagne, a handle of Svedka, and a bottle of Hennessey was more than enough for five days. And by we I mean my parents and grandmother, because I go to college and know very well that that much alcohol between seven decently sized drinkers won't last three nights unless they're Methodists. This is why I always drink with Methodists. More for me.
We bought a ton of food at Sam's but still needed non-bulk items so we braved the horrific corporate hell that is Wal-Mart for things like butter and bread. Being fed up at this point, I offered to be the sentinel and guard the alcohol while my family went in for yet another shopping trip. Our little rental car was absolutely brand new, and it had an alarm system that we weren't used to, so after my father locked the doors and left and I opened the door to help my grandmother find us again (she got sick of Wal-Mart too), the alarm system started freaking out. An interesting note about alarm systems: absolutely no one gives a shit. At all. Unless you're black or wearing a hoodie (neither of which applied to me at the time), when people see your alarm going off they come over to either laugh at you or try to help, both of which happened to be in abundance as the alarm went crazy. After like ten minutes, my parents finally came back out and hit the Shut Up Button on the remote. We managed to somehow fit all of that alcohol, four people's worth of luggage for over a week, AND groceries for five days into a cute little Ford Escape (God, we really abused that car over the coming days), and set off into the desert. Rather soon outside of Vegas we came upon a roadside correctional facility with a billboard that said, "Caution. Potential Escaped Prisoners." Queue creepy urban legend.
After a rather uneventful trip, we came upon the entrance to beautiful Zion. Now, I wouldn't cross my grandmother in a very large array of situations (most of them involving public service charges or late food at a restaurant), but that car ride through Zion absolutely owned her. Between screams of "Oh my God we're going to die!" from my grandmother and "Oh my God it's SOOO GORGEOUS!" from my mother (equally obnoxious when repeated ad nauseam), I made it through to the other side of the park with most of my hair still firmly in my scalp. A feat, I think, that deserves some sort of reward.
We made it to our beautiful cabin on a mountain, exhausted after a long drive and ready to relax. Now, it's important to remember that while my family is great at a lot of things, figuring out new technology is not one of them. This job usually falls to me because I'm the college student (if I'd have known that "You're supposed to be smart, you go to Yale" was going to be the bane of my existence every time the Internet stopped working, I might have reconsidered. Or pretended to go deaf. Something logical like that.). When we got to the house, we followed the instructions about getting into the garage with the code provided (fancy!), and I figured the next logical step was to open the one and only door in the garage to get into the house. This was a horrible mistake. An alarm immediately began piercing the pristine mountain calm, and shutting the door again did nothing to sate its thirst for audible destruction. The worst part, however, was that the stupid fucking door led to...the outside again. Not into the cabin at all. WHY would you build two doors from the exact same place to lead into the exact same place? And how the hell were we going to get into the house? We also weren't even entirely sure that this was the right place, so we might have been setting off the alarm in some poor person's house for no reason. Oh, and aren't cops supposed to show up when house alarms go off?
After a lot of mad scrambling and pressure on me to figure out what the hell was going on, we magically figured everything out and finally settled into a nice quiet evening filled with wine and Mormon jokes. The next day we made it into Zion for a hike to the most incredible waterfall I've ever seen in person. The water crashing was so loud it sounded like thunder, and the freezing spray made the Yale/Harvard football game of 2008 seem like a trip to the fucking Bahamas. It was excellent. We made it back to our cabin without incident to wait for the rest of my family. So we waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, we decided that since we had neither cell phone service nor internet, we would do as we were advised by the owner of the cabin and steal Wi-Fi from the Thunderbird Motel parking lot in the bustling, five building town of Mt. Carmel. I say "we" but I really mean my parents, since I reasoned that (A) No matter how little faith you old people may have in my generation, even iPhone users aren't on Facebook ALL the time, so a wall post is a long shot, and (B) If they'd been lost this whole time, they were bound to show up as soon as my parents left for the internet pirating.
Guess who was right? Yep. They showed up about twenty minutes after my parents left, along with their two tiny dogs . The next day we set out to explore the bustling metropolis of Nowhere, Utah. Bearing in mind that no police officers had come to arrest us during the alarm system debacle, and none of us had actually seen a police station among the five buildings of Mount Carmel, our curiosities were piqued when we noticed a police cruiser parked on the side of the road-a seeming speed trap. However, the piquing continued when, hours later, we noticed that it was still there, unmoved, with the officer sitting in the exact same position. Then we realized the horrifying truth.
The police officer was a fucking mannequin.
Have you ever seen House of Wax? Either the old one or the one where Paris Hilton gets a spike rammed through her head? Because that's definitely worth seeing, just so you know. The premise is that people have car trouble, so they walk to this town for help. Everything seems fine except there's no one on the streets. They peek into a church and see that everyone's in there, at a service, so they go into this wax museum to pass the time until everyone gets out and they can ask for help. This is, of course, incredibly unrealistic, I mean what town has an absolute 100% churchgoing record? I live in the Bible Belt and that shit just doesn't happen, no matter how many fanatics you know. Anyway. They realize that the wax statues look incredibly convincing, and they get creeped out because wax museums are creepy, and blah blah blah they finally realize that everyone in the town is actually made of wax and there's a crazy guy who waxed them all and he wants to kill and wax the newcomers and Chad Michael Murray is a horrible actor but God he's attractive.
So now we knew that we were actually living in the House of Wax town, a fact that was only made worse by our accidental visit to a taxidermy museum (there were reindeer to pet outside and we had to go through the museum to get to them. It was so horrifying.). So we were in the middle of nowhere, with no cell phone service, grocery stores, or police around. Queue the insane snowstorm. We got like two feet in one day and one night, which led to rather competitive snow fort building and delicious hot chocolate. But as they say, it's all fun and games until you have to get your grandmother back to the airport so you freak out and try to drive cars that aren't meant to go in snow and end up causing hundreds of dollars in damages to a Prius and relying on the friendly but outwardly terrifying locals to get you back to your cabin after making an emergency grocery store/snow chains run. They do say that, right?
In between all this drama, I also managed to injure my foot during the pressingly important process of running up stairs to get towels to clean up a wine spilling, causing pretty intense pain and ruining my chances of getting to experience one of the things I'd been looking forward to the most: Vegas for New Year's. My parents managed to have a good time though, and my dad got wasted and won $175 by playing with a Blackjack strategy that didn't actually exist because he read the strategy guide wrong. This is awesome.
Being in Vegas requires the ability to move around, so we decided that renting a wheelchair for me was the best option. I spent an entire day living the life of a paraplegic, and I have to say, it's fascinating. I like my legs a lot, and I obviously think that it would be horrible long term, but for a day I got to cut huge lines, have tons of free champagne because the bartenders were too afraid to card me, and watch people try really hard to figure out what happened to me, their shocked silence speaking volumes when my mother steered me around in circles, laughing maniacally, and my father shoved me into a corner backwards on the most crowded elevator I have ever been on, also laughing maniacally. Classy. The day ended with my watching Jersey Shore for the first time and weeping openly for my generation. Weirdest New Year's Day ever.
We stayed in town a bit longer, and between seeing the naked Cirque Du Soleil, winning $40 illegally at a slot machine, and thinking I was locked out of our room for a full 20 minutes, sitting outside forlornly while a drunk Italian guy shouted into a cell phone next to me in the hall, only to find out that I was on the entirely wrong floor, I started to miss home. I have a borderline unhealthy dependence on constant animal fuzziness, and the desert was beginning to make me look like a native Floridian after years of sun abuse. We made it back in one piece, I went to see Tron (in which the main character looks strikingly like a mashup of two of my more serious exes), and I came back to Yale ready to do a lot of work and be all studious and whatnot. All in all, I'd say my holidays were pretty boring. How were yours?
T.
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