Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Thursday, April 26
A good day with The Wife.
I’ve adjusted my schedule at the retailer…I had been opened for pretty much anything on Thursdays because I do not have either hotel on Wednesdays and Thursdays but I told them I am no longer available on Thursdays, a day The Wife generally has off, too.
So we went to a town a couple of hours south of here because The Wife was in the mood for some adventure…First stop was an amusement park located at the top of a mountain…It had some caves The Wife wanted to see…The staff had the good sense to provide a gondola to take you to the top instead of making you hike and The Wife and I reported to the ticket window in good spirits.
We’re here for adventure, dammit, I announced to the hapless clerk.
I’ll tell you something, there are circumstances where I do not handle heights well…This is close to being one of them…I can generally handle gondola rides if I look straight ahead…When I look down or back I tend to get a bit woozy and if I look up at that goddamn razor-thin wire that is the only thing between me and death I do get woozy so I don’t do those things.
There are two caves to tour there…Our guide was rather knowledgeable but blabbed and told lame jokes and it was fun pretending I was a character in that Jules Verne novel where they try to go to the center of the earth…The only bad part to the first cave tour was we went thru a passage that opened up on a cliff…It was railed and whatnot but this another height instance I do not handle well, and I bravely stayed in the cave.
We had some time to kill between caves so I rode the roller coaster…I had noticed this on the ride up, roller coaster track on the side of the mountain, which you don’t see every day…I love roller coasters…Well, love is a strong word and I do not approve of tossing it around willy-nilly so let’s say I like roller coasters a lot…It cost $12 for one ride, which seemed like a lot, so for $13 I exchanged my cave tours ticket for an all-day pass, which meant unlimited rides on the roller coaster.
It was a pretty good ride and for maximum value I got three of them in before the second cave tour…I even closed my eyes for the second one, an old roller coaster riders trick…The Wife does not like roller coasters, tho, so she took a pass.
I was not really looking forward to the second cave tour…I mean, caves are caves, but shows what I know because the King’s Room 150 feet below ground put on as splendid a show as I have seen Mother Nature put on…Stalagmites, stalactites, they even had some fancy lighting that brilliantly accented it.
After that, it was late afternoon and we went to the hot springs…This spa has been around for ages…The original building is still there and the two pools are out of sepia-toned 19th-century postcards that show people in pools longer than football fields…Well, one pool is 400 feet long…The 104-degree pool is smaller…The Wife and I even dove off the diving board a couple of times and I nailed a really good cannonball.
Let me tell you something, I am not small, but size has very little to do with a good cannonball…Form is everything…You wanna hit the water with the small of your back and it takes practice – the kind of practice I’ve put in over the years – to get it right…You don’t move enough and you’re leading with your legs…You move too much and you land flat on your back which not only makes you look like an oaf but hurts besides….You know – know! – when you’ve nailed the perfect cannonball, too…You can feel it…Call it the instincts all the great ones have if you must, but you know.
After that, we headed out…The road is undergoing some chaotic reorganization and – in what is hardly the Upset of the Year – ol’ Sparrow found himself going the wrong way and we ended up in a rather pleasant residential area, replete with old homes with gracious porches and whatnot…So we drove around a bit and we were about to turn right when we saw a sign for Doc Holliday’s burial site…We followed the sign to a trailhead for the hike…The sign advertised a “moderately strenuous” hike of about a half-mile, all of which appeared to be uphill.
Officially, my interest level in this was “LOW” but The Wife loves nonsense like this so I headed up with her…At the top was very old cemetery that needed attention…The lawn needed to be mowed and the trees trimmed but that was not without its charms…As it was, there was a memorial to Doc Holliday but not an actual grave because no one seems to know where in the hell he had been buried…All the records had been lost…He had died broke and the county had buried him at their expense and evidently the old wooden marker, if there had even been that, had deteriorated.
I know it will be tuff to believe, but there was even more splendor to come!!!…We were headed home by an alternate route (they’re identical timewise) and had just headed north towards home…We were on the road out of town when The Wife reaches into the back seat for some trail mix we had purchased early on for thru-the-day snacking when a sandwich shop comes into view and we decide to stop…We turn in and it turns out the Mexican joint in the next county had opened a branch office!!!…I am not making that up!!!….We were hungry, only about a quarter of the way into our long journey home and our fave Mexican joint appears!!!…The Wife noted it seemed cleaner than the one in the next county, and I had to agree…It did not appear they had to bribe the county to pass their health inspection.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 3:30am Thursday morning to 7am Thursday morning…A nice follow-up to the eight hours I got that had ended just after midnight…The weekly numbers should be strong.
The Diary of a Nobody is a novel. All elements are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Anything else is a coincidence.
The Diary of a Nobody was inspired by the 18th century British novel of the same name.
