Vacation Heaven

by Stephanie Black

Big thanks to Jordan McCollum for last week’s fantastic guest blog. I was at a family reunion, having an absolute blast. This was me all week:

Note the cheerful smile and the soggy state of being. Ahhh. We spent the week at a lake in Tennessee, swimming, tubing, jet skiing, kayaking, fishing (not me--fishing is for crazy people who like to get up early and pursue creatures that can be caught much more easily in the frozen food section at Costco), and enjoying being with family. I love this lake--clear green water, warm enough so you can just relax and float around without freezing. It's one of my favorite spots on earth.

Here are my daughter and me, having fun tubing behind the jet ski. Tubing is my favorite water sport. Tubing is my only water sport. I tried kneeboarding again this year, but couldn’t do it. Too weak and wimpy and uncoordinated. Water sports haven't ever been my thing. I tried water skiing a few times as a teenager, but sending my body pinwheeling into a lake at speeds normally only reached by motorized vehicles didn't turn out to be my hobby of choice. Maybe I would have liked it better if I'd ever gotten good enough to stay up for a significant lenghth of time, but even after I learned to get up, I knew I was going to tumble into the water sooner or later, and it might hurt, and one of these times I might really hurt myself. Eventually I figured the heck with this. But I can tube because it involves no skill. You just sit in the tube and hang on like crazy. I do make a policy of not tubing behind drivers who actively try to kill their riders. I like staying in the tube when I ride.

Random tube trivia: the tube I was riding was named the Surf Savage. This would be a good nickname for Jeff, if he ever decides to ride the waves. My daughter was riding in the Airhead, a title which doesn’t apply to her very well. She’s fifteen years old and reads Dostoevsky for fun.

Another source of entertainment at the reunion was the rope swing. You climb up on platform, sit on the swing and wheeeeeeeeee!!!!--you swoop down the hill, out over the lake and back up again. I did ride the swing—I get courage points for that, right?—but unlike my husband and several of my children, I elected to stay on the swing for the whole ride. Some people liked to jump. The key was to land on your feet in the water. Not on your back (ouch) or your belly (ouch). I thought I might try jumping, until I was up on that swing about a million feet above the water and decided forget it. I was afraid I’d land wrong, jump when the water was too shallow (unlikely—the lake gets deep very close to the shore, but I'm paranoid). So I left the jumping to braver souls, like my nine-year-old son and remained in my chickenhood. Note to self: cancel sky-diving lessons.

But despite chronic chickenhood, I do occasionally write a book and throw it out there, risking whatever comments people want to post on Goodreads. Methods of Madness is now in bookstores. Here I am--with my hair combed this time--happily holding my new book. While my outfit doesn't match my book cover this time, note that the bush behind me is quite coordinated with the green lettering. Groovy, eh?