Brian has lived here for more than 4 years, and his people are retardedly, frustratingly difficult to lure up here. It’s only a 60-75 minute drive, but you would think we live on the moon. At OSU-UM day, I asked Brian’s cousin’s wife about coming up to go to the Lights at the Zoo, and she seemed excited and offered up a date (this past Friday) that worked for us. The boys worked out the plans last week, and cousin Doug and fam left Tiffin for our house as soon as Doug got off work. Doug had been here before, but Becky and the kids hadn’t.
Becky had said she wanted to see our basement, so when they got here, they got a basement tour and then we left for the Zoo (in separate cars). We had not anticipated the long wait to park…we waited on the Trail for 40 minutes or so, just to get into the Zoo lot…we might have tried to park off Broadway, but with kids and being in two cars and them not being very familiar with the area, we decided to ride out the wait on the Trail. Once we parked, we had a 15-20 minute wait to buy their tickets (which actually was a semi-expensive clustercuss, since I thought we could use the coupons on pepsi cans for free kids admissions with the purchase of an adult ticket, but that coupon was only for Monday through Thursday). No one seemed very pleased after all the waiting.
I thought the kids would be amazed by the lights, as they had never been to the Zoo lights before, but I think they were pretty “meh” about the whole experience. If they’ve ever been to the Zoo at all, it’s been a long time – so they wanted to see animals…and the animals were not so much available. They saw a seal laying in a spotlight on a rock first thing, and that was about it. Eventually we saw some tigers and penguins in pretty dark quarters, and we did see the train sets (same trains as 30 years ago – and same Swanton RR club dudes, I think) and some bugs when we were inside, but that’s about it. The kids were most excited about buying shitty popcorn and/or pretzels. Whatever. I was sure the polar bears would be out doing things, but they weren’t, and I was sure that we’d be able to see some monkeys or primates somewhere along the way, but not so much. Oh well, at least we saw the #8 most awesome Christmas tree in America. Maybe taking the kids in the summer would be more enjoyable for everyone.
You may remember from previous years that Brian’s work usually gives out crazy Christmas presents – gift cards for the dudes and jewelry for the ladies – I have some ugly (though supposedly expensive) jewelry from the last few Christmas dinners. Since I started going to these dinners, they were always in Upper Sandusky, but this year the dinner was in Marion (which adds, something like, 1/2 hour each way to our trip). The old man who was responsible for the Christmas presents was made to retire before Christmas last year, but he had already bought all that year’s presents. This year was the first one that he was not involved in. Supposedly our previous Christmas presents were worth $1,000/couple…and this year, Brian was told to expect less by about 1/2…but when we opened the envelope when we finally got to leave the party (after sitting there THREE HOURS), we were, um, very disappointed. I think we may have LOST money on the dinner, if you consider the gas and 7 hours of our time (during which we missed watching Toledo lose the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl and also the Ladies beat Marquette). All we did was check our phones and act awkward the whole time, so yay for that adventure.
The only fun thing we did on Saturday was take pictures of Kim’s kids with Christmas lights. Yay for cuteness and being able to leave quickly when the kids get to be kind of annoying.