Cheerios, Lice Checks, Ice Cream Socials & Passports: A Retrospective

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The biggest trip of my 26.75-year-old life thus far took place in 1999. Unfortunately for me, that pre-dated:

-Affordable digital cameras
-Customized travel soundtracks on IPODs
-Blogging for mass consumption
-Being introduced to tweezers, which means I'm ecstatic to retake my passport photo in 2009

Because I am already recollecting the highlights and lowlights of a trip taken a decade ago, I'm taking Memory Lane down even further with a mini-autobiography featuring the most 'significant' moments from each year of my youth - this is where the Cheerios, Lice Checks and Ice Cream Socials come into play (see THE FORMATIVE YEARS).


THE TRIP - May 1999

My high school graduation present to myself was a two-week European guided bus tour with my grandmother whose company I appreciate much more now that I am not an insufferable adolescent. Because it cost $2,000 to book, Mom fronted the money and then recouped by confiscating every dime given to me at my graduation party.

Now before I scribble down what I remember most about this trip, I want to be clear that despite my sarcasm and shame at the stigma of an American guided tour group: I loved Europe. Loved it. I didn't want to come back to the States; I even considered hiding in one of those Mount Pilatus cable cars until the tour bus accidentally left without me. And somewhere in a parallel universe, I feel like part of me did stay behind - a me that married a rich Swiss banker and became an expert snowboarder, perpetual globetrotter and connoisseur of fine cheeses, not the self-made me who stayed in Indianapolis, took up a rewarding but unlucrative career in the nonprofit sector and became a connoisseur only of ethnic restaurants within a 25-mile radius. Being too far into debt and life to extricate myself for prolonged travel, I settle for unlimited road trips and at least two vacations per year that require airfare.


The Itinerary: Italy, Switzerland, England, France

The Packet - Upon landing at the airport, Brendan Tours presented us with a mustard yellow information satchel so ugly that I swear my retinas actually burned - they were the kind of thing that immediately identify you as a tourist, which is obviously how none of us aspire to look.

The Bus - Basically an information satchel with wheels.

The Tour Guide - Mona was from Belgium, spoke nine languages and had very little tolerance for Americans. When I replay her voice in my head, I can only hear it as crackling over the bus P.A. system.

The Travel Companions - The majority of people on our bus were senior citizens, but two sets of them had brought their grandkids as well: three total (two females, one male) and all there as a high school graduation present.

The Currency - God bless the Euro, that's all I have to say about that ex-foreign exchange rate shenanigans.

The Hotels - I never really understood how spacious ("wasteful") the U.S. was until I walked into my first hotel bathroom in Rome and realized I could probably shower and use the toilet at the same time.

The Parking - As if the toy cars in Rome weren't usual enough, trying to wrap my mind around the driving and parking decisions (oftentimes double parallel parked) was an exercise in futility.

The Cliche - Our first night "out on the town" (specifically: being hidden in the basement of a restaurant in Rome) had me being THAT girl - the 18-year-old who can drink legally in Europe and therefore makes the completely classless decision to toss back watered-down wine after watered-down wine until I ended up drunk, sick and surrounded by the crumbs and wrappers of prepackaged breadstick.

The Dinner - Our trip was almost two weeks, and I do not exaggerate when I say that at least six of our dinners were veal - this means I actually LOST weight the first week, which is absolutely not what you're supposed to do in Italy.

The Crush - I developed a crush on my soft-spoken co-highschooler Andrew. He was a red-head, which usually creeps me out, but being on a bus full of wrinkled people while you're driving through epic landscapes will make you think crazy things.

The Public Indecency - The first time I ever saw a man urinate was a Venetian bagman surrounded by a posse of pigeons.

The Hole - One of the most painful experiences of my life was ODing on gelato in Florence and paying money to use the public restroom, only to discover it was just a hole in the floor with foot grips on either side and no privacy door. It would have been hard enough just to URINATE without dribbling, so I went storefront to storefront while my bowels imploded until a leather store let me in to use its blessed porcelain stall.

The Hideout - After becoming sick of people (it happens), I stole away from the group to wander around and take pictures on my own in Lucerne. I later got reamed by my travel companions and received the silent treatment from my grandmother until her spirits rose again with the 36-ounce stein she polished off at dinner that night.

The Almost Kiss - While unattended in Lucerne, a Swiss man tried to kiss me after chatting for a mere three minutes in broad, sober daylight - to which I responded (without irony) "we just met; that's not how Americans do things." I also distinctly recall being dressed in an unflattering long-sleeved denim shirt and khaki shorts, so he had to have been either visually impaired, a male prostitute, or a visually-impaired male prostitute.

The Camera - To this day, the incident that gives me the most heartache is taking roughly 140 exquisite pictures in Switzerland, only to discover none of them turned out because the film hadn't been fed properly. To be clear: I toted around an ancient, bulky camera with three lenses the WHOLE trip, but Switzerland is the place where I still envision the perfect snapshots I took from a wall I scaled (even though I'm afraid of heights), a dollhouse church in the bottom of the Alps and a blade dancer in mid-swivel.

The Mixed Drinks - The Hard Alcohol:Mixer ratio is AWFUL abroad (Canada is probably the worst offender) - if you're going to try and get intoxicated, do it off wine or beer. Anything else is a waste of calories and money.

The Snoring - Although she still insists she doesn't, my grandmother (a very tiny woman) snored so loud that I had to bring my bedding into the 3x3 bathrooms and plug my ears with toilet paper so I could sleep at night.

The Hoverspeed - Hopping the air ferry to the White Cliffs of Dover was sheer joy, especially since the only other people on it were barowners getting carts full of duty-free cigarettes and liquor.

The Unthinkable - Since London is English-speaking, our travel group got to pick dinner on its own - I was outvoted and ended up at (drumroll, please) the Hard Rock London.

The Forgotten City - I feel like there's something I'm supposed to remember or say about Versailles or the Eiffel tower or whatnot, but Paris was rather cursory and anticlimactic since we were only there for a day and most of it was spent shopping at some famous department store I didn't care about.

The Moral - If you're going to do a guided tour in Europe, pick one that gets you from place to place but lets you strike out on your own for meals and activities. Especially when you have a resource like TravelBlog, where a simple forum post will result in natives or frequent fliers telling you what they think you'll love instead of a corporation sending you somewhere they don't think you'll hate.



THE FORMATIVE YEARS

Birth - Born in Abbeville LA and live there til I am 4. Parents have no social life because I am so much of a hellion that no one would babysit me, not even family members. Grandpa makes an exception to feed me jelly beans and lemon drops when I am struck down by chickenpox.

Preschool - Move to Orlando FL where I attend Storybook Preschool and am known to sit atop the playground tower tossing Cheerios, one at a time, to my eagerly awaiting minions. Bust open spot just above my eye when I run into a mailbox flag trying to learn to ride a bicycle - scar isn't noticeable until my sister introduces me to tweezers over a decade later.

1st Grade - Move to Carmel IN. Attend Orchard Park Elementary for an extremely brief spell, where all I remember is the cheese dog I have for lunch one day. Transfer to Woodbrook, where my first day and assignment in Mrs. Scholer's class is to color the picture of an African-American with a black crayon, but no one has a spare black crayon so I color him purple instead. It is worth noting that the sole reason I never had a black crayon on had was because I had thrown them all away so I could listen to the indescribably pleasing sound of classmates rooting through my crayon box.

2nd Grade - Have no significant memories from this grade, except that I really, really like practicing cursive on the special cursive paper with my Strawberry Shortcake pencil that is half the length of my body.

3rd Grade - Get in trouble with the evil Mrs. Luzader, who glares me down when she and all my other classmates return to our classroom to discover me already sitting there, shameful and alone with my plastic cup of ice cream, because I hadn't paid attention to the instructions about how we were to proceed to and from our Ice Cream
Social in the cafeteria.

4th Grade - After struggling with multiplication and long division, I am the only person in Mr. Slipher's class to get an A+ on our math test, but then a classmate steals my thunder when he actually pays attention while going over the correct answers and points out his test was misgraded and that he, too, got an A+. This is also the year I notice I thoroughly enjoy lice checks and ask the nurse to double-check my hair when she doesn't find anything.

5th Grade - Fuck up on "Wednesday" in the Spelling Bee. Also get yelled at for reading non school-related books under my desk because I have already read ahead on everything we were going over in class.

6th Grade - Have to get glasses and don't know if it's because I failed the in-school eye exam or because the doctors giving the exam saw that I was wearing black and white sequined Keds. Memorize the Preposition Song (which I still know) and call Mrs. Rockey out when she's diagramming a sentence and tries to claim both "crystal" and "clear" are adjectives in "crystal clear water." Obviously they're not, as crystal is an adverb describing clear (an adjective), not the water (a noun).

7th Grade - Spend the year in Mrs. McLear’s English class literally doing nothing while everyone brushes up on grammar because they had all failed her grammar pre-test. Begin to suspect public schools and their LCD standards might be holding me back. Do volunteer work in Natural Science department of Children's Museum but quit when fellow volunteer expresses interest in me while I am busy constructing a dam in our water and sand block.

8th Grade - Get contacts, even though I am deathly afraid of things being near my eyeballs. Fall in love with November Rain after it's played repeatedly on the jukebox in our cafeteria.

9th Grade - Start my first year at a Catholic high school where we wear uniforms to school but anything we want to gym class and get slapped with detention for minor offenses, like untucked shirts or chewing gum.

10th Grade - Parents drag me to an Elvis impersonator concert where the two opening acts were Whitney Houston and Willie Nelson impersonators, but "Whitney" got sick so "Willie" had to fill in for two hours, so I tried hiding in the bathroom only to discover that the theater owners had had the foresight to install stall speakers so no one could miss a second of such aural splendor.

11th Grade - Attend Youth Leadership Conference in Washington D.C. Share a room with an insomniac Italian girl who pees with the door open - am intrigued at this lack of propriety. Immediately determine my new goal is to meet everyone ever made, which plants the seed for Europe.

12th Grade - My Mazda 626 breaks down and I have to drive Dad's spare van to school, affectionately referred to as "The White Knight." It has 250,000 miles on it (500,000 when we gave it to Goodwill), rides approximately one inch off the ground, has a rusted front end, two soccer decals, and a broken muffler that single-handedly violates every fuel emission standard on the planet. Everyone drives me insane asking about my plans for college, which ends up being Indiana University. This leads into graduation and Europe, thus ending my tale where it began.

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Photos

Childhood Montage
For enlightenment on the meaning behind these seemingly A.D.D. images, please see blog.