A Pointless Journey. A Fun Story.

It was a day somewhere in late October...


My dad is a nature guy. That's his job. He goes out into fields and forests and dales and inspects dirt. The title "Soil Scientist" doesn't do too much justice to the profession. He runs his own business and has his own office and clients and is apparently a quite highly regarded man in the state. I'm guessing this is because he basically gives everyone who wants to build something somewhere the permission to build that something somewhere. But we're straying...It was a Sunday, and on Sundays we don't usually do anything after church except chores, eating, talking about doing yard work, and watching tv. But this Sunday after a wonderful and quite traditional sandwich lunch, mom prided herself in pushing dad out the door with his three children and leaving him to do with us as he willed.


Now, I bring my camera virtually everywhere. Sometimes my smaller, more compact digital, sometimes my inherited, bigger, bulkier Panasonic Lumix. Today I brought the latter. It was a b-e-a-utiful day out, sun shining brightly through the thinning branches, and the temp was anything drastically unseasonal. It was nice. So dad brought us to Valley Falls, a small park/beachy place about a mile away that we can reach by driving or taking the once-traintrack trail behind my house.
We drove.
And we brought my little Scoodle (poodle/scottish terrier, Odie) with us. He's the much less hyper and jumpy of my two dogs. When we got to the park, my older brother started walking absently around with his cell phone, texting, and my little brother tagged along, dragging Odie with him. So they were gone, and my dad had his quite-much-more-expensive-costing-and-l0oking camera, so, as for some reason we always seem to do with things, we inconspiculously developed an unspoken, unaddressed competition of who could take the prettiest pictures. I quite frankly think I won.
At least in the creative department. Artsy pictures are my faves.
We left a few hours later after a good long time of me and my older brother Gregory observing and chuckling at hikers and walkers tripping up and down these really annoyingly crafted stairs. It was fun. When we got in the car, my dad said he was going to take us to get some ice cream. We weren't going to say no of course, so we let him speed us off to who-knows-where and hoped we wouldn't get too lost.
We got lost. How it happened, I don't know, but after about half an hour of dad repeating, "Oh, there's gotta be a place somewhere around here," us kids thoroughly believed that was a lie and were looking at our surroundings: Storrs. We'd gone from Vernon to Storrs. Dad, finally seeming to figure out that maybe it was dragging on a little, started rambling on about differnt places on our way back, and we stopped at all of them, and none of them were open...
So we finally wound up just going to McDonald's, the alternative to everyting. The McDonald's that was about 7 minutes away from Valley Falls.


None of kids said too much about it. We've never been ones to rain on our father's parade. No matter how illogical and odd the parade might be. We just stay quiet for the most part. Sometimes we threw, "Uh...dad, we're in Storrs," at him, and he would respond, "I know, I know. There's a place up at this intersection I think..."


But at the end of the day (because it was getting to be around 6pm by the time this pointless escapade ended) we had our McFlurries and were returning home to mom, who we would tell the story to when dad wasn't around.