lovin those vacations

The fun just keeps on comin', when you have nowhere to be, nothing to do, and wouldnt feel like doing it if you did. We left Silverthorne in a freezing drizzle early last Saturday morning, and before we got to the Clear Creek County line, on the continental divide, snowflakes were blowing through our headlight beams, and skittering across the boat tarp. Felt all kinds of wrong, and completely inconcievable that somewhere, not here, was a warm lake, a balmy breeze, greenery that didnt yet know it was fall. I refused to believe it until nine hundred miles later, I tentatively stuck my foot into water I was sure would be chilly, then waded the rest of the way in, hardly believing such a large body of water could be so comfortably warm.

The boat runs like a demon down there in the lowlands. We didnt realise how adversely the altitude affects it's 130 horses. They didnt gasp and sputter nearly as much as they do at 9,000 feet.

I discovered just how altitude aware I have become, living in a country that counts not only miles, but verticle feet in it's calculation of distance. Somewhere in Missouri, I wondered aloud why every exit sign also had an elevation on it... oh, I was informed, my husband rolling his eyes at my not so brilliant observation, 1,200 feet was the distance between the sign and the exit, not the elevation of said exit.

We spent every possible moment of our week on the water, and only had one rainy day. How about that? Maybe there is something to this karma thing after all. It was cold the day we got there and cold the day we left, but in between, there were some idylic, sunsoaked days. We waterskied till we were dizzy, and invested in a wakeboard which we spent the week trying to master. Wakeboarding is a completely different concept than waterskiing. Waterskiing requires a boat with it's center of gravity incorporated into a flat hull to make the smallest wake possible, and an agressive slalom, speed, and good form is what one exhausts oneself trying to attain. I noticed the "bad boy" ski, the neon green sliver the MEN ride, had a completely different feel on such warm water. On the other hand, a wakeboard resembles in no way the fast turns and even roostertails of a ski. A good wakeboarder spends more time above the water than on it. The point of the wide, flat surface of a wakeboard is to sling it's rider off the swell of the wake, across the wake, to land on the downward slope on the other side. The time spent between launch and landing is what makes a wakeboarder "good". So the larger the wake, the more time spent airborn, the more impressive the tricks and maneuveres, and of course... the better the crashes. There are as many wakeboarders with torn ACL's and just generally bad knees and backs as there are snowboarders. Large wakes require boats with deep V hulls, run barely on plane, slowly gouging a deep furrow in the water. One really cannot ski well and wakeboard well behind the same boat. Considering our seventeen foot runabout is neither a skiboat nor a wakeboard boat, we did our best, softening our knees to absorb the too-large wake on a ski, and trying everything we could to make a large enough wake to allow us to jump to the other side on a wakeboard. (I only made it all the way across once, and then, typical... I was so surprised and elated I dropped the rope.)

We stayed in Branson, where the lodging was cheap, and drove out to the lake every day, where we rented a boatslip for the week. It was wonderful not having to load it on the trailer, but just to tie it up and leave it bobbing in the water overnight. It was just a very humble little boat, sandwiched between luxery cruisers with onboard bathrooms and sleeping quarters, but then, we didnt really fit the profile there either, as was observed by the talkative man in the lawnchair, parked by the boat launch. "Sure you kids don' nade some help there?...Huh! looka that. Yo act lak yuh done that bafore!" Nearly wanted to offend Mr.B. I tell his to embrace his baby face.

The first day we were there, we were still keyed up and on edge, not fully reallising that we were on vacation and Seymour Lodging was nine hundred miles away. Even if there were a crisis, we could do nothing about it. Every day we spent on the water, our shoulders loosened a bit, and we got a little less morbid and cynical. The last night there, we took the boat out to the middle of the lake and shut it off, allowing it to be tossed back and forth on the wind-whipped surface, and watched a red-gold sun set, leaving a flaming trail across the lake, shattered by the waves into a million shimmering splinters. As it dropped behind the blue Ozark hills and caressed the sky with it's last fingers of pale pink, we loaded the boat on the trailer and tied it down, much happier and more relaxed. We didnt even argue over the proper way to tuck it in like we usually do. Vacations are good.

Now we sit here in western Kansas, still nothing much to do... except clean an entire summer's worth of dirt and mouse droppings out of a house that feels more and more abandoned, winterise the boat, winterise the yard, and attempt a cobbled-together repair on a shop door that the wind caved in. Ok, so not entirely nothing. Our vacation isnt completely over yet, but that day feels closer than it did than when we were out watching the sun set over the lake.