Wonderful Vacation Tragedies.

This is going to be convoluted.
About 5 years ago my crazy Father started announcing his death. "I'll be dead in 5 years so you better be nice to me", the rest of us laughed and every one remember that his Father said the same thing for the last 15 years of his life.
This year he announced that this was his last year of life and wanted to go to Daytona and the Dominican Republic one last time. I voted DR because every spring hump back whales gather in the Bay of Semana for calving. Nothing good gathers in Daytona anymore.
Well he decided that he couldn't make the trip to the DR so off we went to Daytona. We made this trip alot during my misspent youth. Usually two or more families crammed into a huge station wagon. (A station wagon was a giant car. It was long and low with a mile long hood and the luckiest kids got to ride in the way back and face backwards. We crammed people in the seats and pile suitcases on top.) The station wagon was the way to travel, for the first 5 or 6 hours. Then the way back AC crapped out and an infant or toddler would start to scream for merciful death. You know the scream that suddenly stops for a few seconds and your ears say ahh, but the monster was just getting a bigger lung full of air.
But eight hours in that station wagon was ok if we were headed to the beach.....Daytona back then was great. We would wade out to the breakers and body surf or bounce over waves and pretend Submarines and Sharks and Dolphins were just over the next wave. Mom and Dad or somebody else half responsible would always be with us and nobody knew what a riptide was. Back then the riptide was the under tow and it was only there very early in the morning.
After burning ourselves lobster red the first day we'd head to the Boardwalk and it never had boards.
But this was the last trip and it was different. We flew. No way backs with no AC, just assholes who refuse to turn off their cell phones.
The Boardwalk was about 2/3 destroyed some time ago and never rebuilt. The super cool video games have been replaced by crap. There are signs about Riptide all over the beach and the best thing in the world is now outlawed. Way back you could drive on the beach. Dad would get the Station Wagon up to 50 on the beach. Now you have to buy a special permit and it's only during special times and places. It's probably much better for the ocean, but.........
On the 4Th my boy and I wandered down to the Pier and watched what Florida calls Independence Day and the rest of us call the re-enactment of the opening of Saving Private Ryan. If you haven't seen it, I can't describe it.
Then we flew home with the assholes who were too important to turn off the cell phones. They refuse to turn off the cell phone even though it could turn our nice little jet fuel laden airplane into a giant flaming tube of death. I hate to fly and have bad thoughts when I do fly. Thoughts about killing everybody else on the plane for one reason or another.
Then we landed and went into the hell known as Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Nothing in the Atlanta Airport works the way it was designed. It's like a bad bootleg copy of a good airport. You know a VHS copy with bad tracking. All the things that make a great airport are there but they kind of drag and the sound isn't quite right. Or think of it as a digital TV signal that almost comes in. So you see a baggage carousel but there are blocks missing out of the corners.
But we survived the airport and the parking that should have cost $90 for the week that charged the credit card $130 without a human in sight.
I was feeling strange so I spent the night with my parents and the boy. At some point I woke up drenched in sweat standing in the kitchen telling some one about 43000 pieces of rebar attached to 23000 cables holding down the sea. Mom found me and put me back in bed with a 105 fever. I explained to her we had to loosen the cables before the next full moon or the whole system would crash. I dare you to match the validity of my hallucinations.
The next day I woke up early and went to work and spent the day sweating and talking to customers who were visiting.
And that afternoon I discovered the tragedy. My garden had been attacked. Something has eaten the leaves off all my tomatoes. They left peppers.
Then the Wonderful thing happened. I was healing myself in the AC with lots of cough syrup and listening to the radio. Iggy Pop was talking to someone and said "blah, blah...Wonderful things happen." About 10 minutes later my 71 year old aunt called and said "Was your vacation wonderful?"