A Free Family’s vacation continues and so do the guest posts. Today, I’ve got the pleasure of welcoming Mickey from The Prettiest Denny’s Waitress aboard. Mickey’s got the uncanny knack of making my laugh my ass off on a regular basis, so I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather have captain the ship for a day. Without further ado, here’s Mickey…

I hope A Free Man is out there earning his moniker right now, gallivanting barefoot on those white sands he was telling us all about, frolicking in the surf and enjoying the waning days of the southern summer. Watch out for the sharks, dude. They bite.

I was thinking about some of my childhood family vacations, random scenes bouncing around in my head. My memories of them are just that, individual scenes I recall out of context, flashes of fun that I have to concentrate on to recall which particular trip they were a part of. In doing so, I’ve quickly come to the conclusion that my kids (should I ever have any) are never going to Disney World. I went to Orlando and its surrounding attractions when I was five or six years old, and, for the same reasons kids frequently enjoy the cardboard boxes more than the toys that came in them, I think that kind of thing is lost on a kid. Or at least it was lost on me.

Here’s why: River Country. Yeah, I thought Space Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad were a blast and I recall the thrill of the water slides at nearby Wet ‘n’ Wild water park, but far and away the most fun I ever had in Florida (and that counts several trips to that armpit of a state as an adult), was at Disney’s River Country, a collection of rope ladders and tire swings in a natural-water lagoon. In other words, amidst all the high-tech put-on splendor of the Magic Kingdom, the most fun I had was in their approximation of a redneck backwoods swimmin’ hole. (It has since closed, in part due to laws against water parks in natural bodies of water, but also because of the high-tech put-on splendor of Disney’s other, newer water attractions.)

That theme of enjoying the low-brow and inexpensive continued in my life. A family reunion in upstate New York saw us kids spending the whole day trying to avoid getting impaled on the six-inch valve stems of old inner tubes while we splashed euphorically in a muddy little pond. Absolute heaven. I barely remember the nearby kitsch of Niagara Falls.

But why go all the way to Florida or New York? Outside of those two trips, we really didn’t travel far when I was a kid, and it’s a good thing. One of the best times I ever had as a kid was in my own backyard. For reasons now forgotten there was a pile of railroad ties in our yard. There never was, before or after, any landscaping in the yard utilizing railroad ties. Regardless of their intended purpose, my brother and I did what all kids eventually do with anything not tied down: we built a fort. Putting it up like giant Lincoln logs, we had a sturdy fort you could get inside of or on top of, held together by nothing but gravity and faith, and a child’s faith is no small thing. A stack of rough, splintery wood kept us perfectly happy for several days of summer vacation without even having to leave the yard.

Shoot, the most memorable part of a week-long summer camp was flinging lumps of wet clay at each other at a clay pit on the banks of the Chester River in Maryland. That still sounds like fun to me. I guess I’m just a dirtbag at my core.

To this day I cast a wary eye toward any diversion that costs a lot of money. It’s not that I haven’t had good times spending far too much money in a bar or enjoyed the hell out of an overpriced concert, but even as an adult most of my fond memories have more to do with the company than the extravagance of the event. That’s why I’ll trade a noisy bar for a bunch of friends around a campfire with a cooler full of beer any day.

And that’s why my kids are never going to Disney World. Besides, they won’t know the difference if I instead take them to that spot far back in the woods in Tennessee with the big ol’ tree with a rope swing hanging out over deep, still water. If they ask, I’ll just tell them the water moccasins are animatronic.

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Image credits:

Live Rattlesnakes

River Country

Fort

 
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