Best Vacation Ever

I think it was about 1999. I had my own apartment and Dad brought a brown van and trailer load of furniture that he had saved from our Knoles Court House days. We filled my new place with old furniture, but had a doozie of a time getting the hide-a-bed sofa in the stairwell and into the second floor apartment.

We watched the movie Tombstone with Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer. Dad wasn't one to watch the same movie over and over: if he was going to spend his time with a second viewing of a great movie, he'd rather wait a good five or ten years in between showings. But we watched Tombstone a few times that week he stayed at my new apartment. We hit Hollywood Video and rented an old movie My Darling Clementine about the gunfight at the OK Corral. It was full of errors in history, even Doc Holliday who was a dentist in real life, performed abdominal surgery in this flick. We watched it and laughed hysterically.

And we started planning...

We planned a McBride vacation to top all the Disneyland trips of our youth. We would take the brown van from St George and drive down to Tombstone, Arizona and see the OK Corral, the Bird Cage Theater, and any other sites a good Wyatt Earp fan cared to see.

We gallivanted through Southern Arizona, down to Tombstone, over to Nogales, Mexico and then headed back north towards Las Vegas. On the way home, we stopped at the Hoover Dam, but didn't have time to do the tour.

That trip taught me so much:

*It taught me that even when on vacation, you can always find someone who knows someone who knows where the nearest LDS chapel is to attend church. We went to Young Womens at some Ward in Benson, Arizona and they found it strange that we made the effort to go to church when we didn't know a soul in the area and were on vacation just passing through. It was that important to Dad to attend church as a family, broken as we were.

*It taught me that you don't really need air conditioning if you have pillow cases, an ice chest, and a little bleach-water. We also stopped at K-Mart and got some cool battery operated personal misting fans that Dad thought were must have purchases for $1 or so.

*It taught me that car trouble can be a learning experience - we all learned how to unpack a van full of junk, change a blown tire on the side of the road, repack all the junk, and limp in to the next town. I was most surprised that Dad didn't lose his temper or yell or curse at any time during that little fiasco.

*It taught me to give. We were at a gas station outside of Lake Havasu City. We had just seen the London Bridge and we stopped at a gas station. A middle aged woman, maybe 40 or 50 years old (she seemed older) was outside asking for money. Dad, always the boy scout, handed her a few cans of food that he had packed along and an extra can opener. The woman looked up almost in tears and thanked him. He handed her a few dollars too. She asked him how she could repay him. Dad gave his usual answer: "Some day, two young men in white shirts and name tags will cross your path. They have a message. Listen to that message."

*It taught me to think of others. We took a little day trip down to Mexico. None of us had been - Dad went sometime right after high school with some friends but wanted to take us. We parked at a McDonald's restaurant just inside the border. (Thank goodness Dad thought to bring several gallons of drinking water with us.) The whole time in Nogales, Dad kept urging us to let him buy us each one thing to remember the trip. We visited several shops and had young "Vato" salesmen yelling at us "We are cheaper than Walmart!" Aubrey got some genuine gold jewelry that turned her finger green within a few hours. (Heidi, what did you get? I don't remember.) I never saw anything that I just couldn't live without. Dad was also looking, but he was looking at things that he would hate. I didn't see him needing a flower pot, or a terra cotta rooster. I finally realized that he was looking to get something for Grandma. She still has the rooster he brought hundreds of miles back to Saint George, then hundreds of more miles to Sonora.

We made it back home, a little sunburned, and a lot closer as a family unit. It was much less expensive than a trip to Disneyland. We went to grocery stores and bought loaves of bread and canned goods to eat. We didn't hit every drive through. We stayed in a motel a few nights, but mostly drove through the night in "the little brown van that could."

I really enjoyed that trip. I still enjoy the memories we made with Dad. That was my best vacation ever.