Breaking Up...With Spring Break

Spring Break used to coincide with Easter. Not anymore. I’m not sure if Spring Break even coincides with spring anymore.

Vacation spots during Spring Break can be tough to call. Nothing is worse than spring skiing with no snow and too many sweaters.

But this Spring Break, things would be different. We’d plan better. The ideal destination would be not too hot, not too cold, not too far, not too close, not too pricey, and not too cheap (no tent camping—I put that one in). And it better be blisteringly memorable.

We settled on a couple of foreign countries. This way the kids would be exposed to different cultures, rich heritage, and majestic scenery. Unlike home, it would be good for them to see places that are not fodder for shallow and salacious reality shows.

The name of the first country we visited was called “Utah.” The second was named “Las Vegas.” Luckily in both cases, we were able to easily communicate with the locals.

In Utah, that was because they spoke English. Every single one of them. Frankly, it was a shock. I wasn’t used to having to translate English. It took a lot of extra concentration. It’s funny though, by the end of the trip I was actually dreaming in English! I guess immersion really does work.

Las Vegas was the polar opposite. It was a prime rib buffet of languages comprised primarily of cuss words. Conveniently posted on cabs, busses, and billboards were lots of helpful pictures of very friendly female natives garbed in what I can only assume were ancestral sequins while displaying full-body sign language to guide hapless tourists like us.

Some of you are saying, “Did this chick sleep through geography? We all know Las Vegas is not another country; it’s another planet.”

I won’t argue the point.

But Utah is different. For example, the Coral Pink Sand Dunes were the unbelievable orange of a bad Mystic tan. I yelled to my family, “Quick! Come look at this!”

They ran over, maybe expecting a slithering sand dune snake. “What? What?”

I grinned at my rare discovery. “Check out the bathrooms.”

My girls peeked inside, and their mouths dropped open. It was so spotless we could picnic off the floor and save getting sand in our sandwiches. That’s when I knew we weren’t in America anymore.

See, here in America, we take pride in our squalid public facilities. Graffiti is art of the repressed, toilet paper everywhere but on the roll flaunts our wealth, while lack of soap and paper towels means only that we are too busy to wash our hands anyway. And perfecting the art of “hovering” makes all those stair-master moments worthwhile.

In Utah, every single bathroom was like that first one. It didn’t matter if it was a pit toilet in the middle of nowhere or a trucker rest stop. Each was a porcelain dream.

Another reason we knew it was a foreign country was because we drove through a town where some of the folks allegedly practice polygamy. Although I didn’t see any “Big Love,” I realized we’d just swapped the reality shows of home for HBO.

I worried my husband might get some harem ideas, but he only said the town looked boring and he wouldn’t want to live there. That was probably because we hadn’t got to Vegas yet. Multiple girlfriends are probably a lot less boring than multiple wives.

Vegas felt like Europe in that it was wildly expensive and people smoked a lot. We were tired of foreign food so we had dinner at California Pizza Kitchen/Sports Betting in the Mirage.

I tried to explain to the kids the finer points of pari-mutuel wagering but I don’t really understand the finer points. I even had trouble defining the term “odds.” Thankfully, there was no Keno at the table or I wouldn’t have been able to explain that either.

On the way home we were stopped and grilled at the checkpoint station. We fessed up to three overripe Utah bananas, which they could have since the fruit was smelling up the minivan.

They said they didn’t want our stinkin’ bananas. They did want us to pop the hatch so they could check for contraband soil or seeds. Uh-oh. Did a gallon ziploc of orange sand count? Were we going to be thrown in a foreign clinker?

Before we could call the American Embassy, they realized we had California plates and waved us through. Whew! That was a close one.

It felt good to be back in America.