Spring Break

Yesterday, it being spring break and all, my family drove down to Columbus so we could go to Cosi. Poncho was there in November with Mom and Dad, and they thought we would all like to see it. So we got up early and packed into the car to set off on our journey.

Usually I like long drives. I like looking out the window at the woody scenes passing silently by, at the farm houses and tumbledown sheds and old barns, at the spreading fields and thickly forested hillsides.
Instead, the ride was not so peaceful.
Dad blasted the music and “put the pedal to the metal” (as Grandpa Vegas would say… he would have also remarked that we “musta been flyin'” and then probably made some car noises… vrrrrrrrrrrrr….). I watched the spedometer and found that we were going 90 mph!
Me: (clenching my teeth and bracing for my surely inevitable death) “Slow down, man!”
Dad: “I’m going with the flow of traffic, see? I wanna catch up with that horse trailer up there, he’s making good time.”
I tried not to watch the road.
Apparently, so did Dad.
Dad: “Hey, look, deer!”
Dodge: “Keep your eyes on the road!”
Dad: “That wouldn’t last long. Shreds your eyeballs right up.”
Yep, that’s my dad. Always has a smarty-pants answer.

Every once in a while, though, we did manage to slow down…
Dad: “There’s a snake in the grass!”
Me: “Huh?”
Dad: “Hey, Smoky, get off the road! Look at him, he’s causing a hazardous scenario.”
I noticed the state trooper car Dad was pointing at. All around us, the drivers were slowing down to the actual speed limit– which now felt like a crawl– and everyone was getting cramped.
Dad: “There’s a snake in the grass! There’s a bear in the air!”

We finally did make it to Columbus unharmed. Well, my eardrums may have suffered some damage. But oh well. I was just happy to see Columbus. I really want to spend more time in the actual city, rather than some attraction such as Cosi, next time we go down. I want to see if it really is better than Cleveland (which is how it seems, but who knows? Maybe it’s full of snotty people like in Lakewood, or maybe its public transportation is just as crappy as RTA, or maybe it’s insipid and fakey. Only one way to find out). 
We got into Cosi and there was a huge line of people wrapping around the entrance area. Luckily, we got to skip it since Mom and Dad bought a membership last time they went.
We went up to the members desk, where a guy greeted us with “How are you folks today?”
Dad: “Horrible, thank you.”
And the guy didn’t even notice.

Thus began our Cosi adventure. The boys and Dad and I did the Adventure exhibit, which is an interactive thing where you go into this big setup that looks like caverns, and you have to solve puzzles and go through mazes and such to find clues and get into this Observatory thing. When we got out, we found Mom and set off looking at all the other exhibits. My favorite was Progress, which is a set that you can roam around on. It’s supposed to be the same street but at different time periods. One was “Dr Quinn time” as we called it, and the other was the 60’s.
Near lunchtime, Dad and the boys decided they were going to go outside into the science park thing. There was a tiny green house out there. When they came back in, they told me that it was a Pod, an super-efficient eco house. Of course I had to go see it. Dodge came with me, and as we gazed into the tiny dwelling, we were both struck with what shall be heretofore referred to as Obsessive-ComPodsiveness. We started dreaming up Pods for ourselves. Single-person Pods, family Pods, Pod villages.

Dad and Poncho hung out at the oceans exhibit for a while as Mom took Dodge and I through the whole museum in search of more information on the Pod. She’d seen it while we were in Adventure, but she couldn’t remember where it was. Along the way, we ended up stopping to play with a voice changer, a metal dinosaur, a slow-mo video thing, optical illusions, and a wheel race thing (where I tripped over a metal post and got a nasty bruise). We finally found the Pod information after meeting up with Dad and Poncho again. Dodge and I swore we would build a Pod this summer.

When we finally left, hungry and tired, it was snowing. We stopped at the Scariest Fakeworld EVER, and then we went all the way home. Dad drove the speed limit on the way back, although this time I thought he would fall asleep, which was just as scary. And the roads were not too good from all the snow.
Before we got home we stopped at Grandma and Grandpa Vegas’ house, where Mom told me to tell them about the ride to Columbus.
Me: “Dad was going 90! I was so scared! And then he was getting all hyper, he kept saying stuff like ‘there’s a snake in the grass! There’s a bear in the air!'”
Grandpa: “Oh yeah, Smoky.”

So that was our grand adventure for the week. Dodge is as we speak drawing plans for the Pod he is going to build, and he’s even got Dad thinking about where we can get materials… So, things are interesting around here. :)

Peace,
Pen