the maple weekend: a comedy of errors

Oh goodness, our weekend was plum full of good intentions.  (I’m a feelin’ like story telling’, so settle in friends)

What We Planned:

Drive to Virginia. (The Motherland.  The Oasis.)   Meet my brother. (That wiley New Zealand one.) Visit the Maple Festival together in Highland County.

What Actually Happened:

We got to Virginia.  That part worked out pretty much just as planned. Check.

On Saturday morning the kids and I loaded up and prepared for the two hour drive up the mountain, anxiously anticipating All Things Maple.  Maple donuts.  Maple cotton candy.  Maple syrup.  Maple pancakes.  Maple BBQ.  Maple candy.  Maple sugar.  Maple cream.  Maple skies.  Maple roads.  Maple friendships.  Maple clouds.  Maple sunshine.

We exchanged messages with Douglas and planned to meet at the first tiny maple town called Monterrey.  Small town.  Easy to find one another.  Armed with cell phones like the people all do these days.

The roads were so curvy.  I was trying to catch up to Douglas, whom I, at one time, knew to be only about ten minutes ahead of me.  Did I mention the roads were curvy?  The mountain roads were really curvy.  So very curvy.  All The Curves.

We didn’t have any expulsion of the car sickness.  We did, however, have lots of upset tummies and pleas to find less curvy roads and cries of why-didn’t-we-bring-the-peppermint.  We also decided to rename the various words describing the negative outcome of car sickness.  The words that sometimes cause visceral reactions and create a more sick feeling.  (Words have such power, you know.)  We are now replacing puke or vomit or any such vulgar word with the word “maple”.  (I think it’s a bad choice.  We all do, really.  But.  It kind of stuck this weekend.)  As in, “If you are going to maple, you need to alert the driver so she can find a place to pull off to avoid the rest of us mapling when we hear you maple.”

My family rarely vacationed.  But we did do this maple syrup festival thing.  Almost every March of our childhoods.  My dad liked it.  He liked the curvy roads and he liked the old farms and he liked the sugar camps where the maple syrup is tapped and he liked to pretend it was vacation enough for his four kids.  Shoot, once we were all hopped up on maple sugar, we kind of thought it was vacation enough most years too.

Where was I?

Oh yeah.  Still on those curvy roads.  It was waaaay more than two hours on those curves.  Maybe it was three at least – or four – before we reached Monterrey.  The town is rather small.  One blinking stop light.

But not that Saturday.  That Saturday the entire population of the state of Virginia was crammed onto the town’s one single main street.  One single main street.  One.  People were waiting in line forty-five minutes for kettle corn.  Kettle corn.  Hey, you guys in line – kettle corn is just popcorn with sugar.  Popcorn with sugar.  Is forty-five minutes of your life worth popcorn with sugar?

Even Douglas in his weathered cowboy hat wouldn’t stand out in that crowd.  No way was I going to just happen upon him.  And guess what is really cool about Monterrey?  There is no cell service.  (Seriously.  That is actually cool.  Just, maybe not right then.)   No cell service.  Sixty billion strangers on one street and the smell of kettle corn that I wasn’t buying in the air and a line for maple glazed chicken that was longer than our driveway and no cell service and no Uncle Douglas and a bunch of bellies just desperate to not be on a curvy road.

Bergen astutely announced, “I think this is actually simply a test of how much a person can take before they become irritable.”

This wasn’t the Maple Festival my eight year old self remembered.

Except for this one building over my shoulder here.

That building.  That was the building where my dad let us pick out anything we wanted for a snack.  I picked butterscotch pudding.  In a tiny metal can with a pop top lid.  (You guys tracking with me?)  It must have been more than thirty years earlier (thirty years!) when I excitedly bought my butterscotch pudding.  And then we returned to our campground.  I ate that tiny tin can of butterscotch pudding.  I loved butterscotch back then.  Until that very evening when my love of butterscotch ended for all eternity.  It ended in the middle of the night as I mapled butterscotch pudding all over myself and my sleeping brothers in our cozy sleeping bags.

Yep, kids.  See the building where Mommy’s love of butterscotch ended nigh on thirty years ago?

We ate all the non-maple snacks our car held, sighed at the “no service” message on the cell phone and said, “Let’s get out of this town.”

The little town of Monterrey is nearish to the little town of McDowel – another spot on the maple tour map.  The towns are separated by – you guessed it – more curvy roads!

A little sensor on my car warned “check left rear tire pressure” – and I wanted to.  But there were those curvy roads you know.  And no shoulder to pull over.  And the people.  All the people.

At McDowell we felt hope rise in our chests like little songbirds.  (Eh.  We just mostly felt really hungry and were relived to see much shorter lines and less people.)

McDowell proved to be the mecca of maple we desired.

No service on the phone.  No Douglas anywhere so I said, “You guys.  We came for maple.  We’re getting everything maple.  And if, after consuming all the maple we can stand, we still can’t find Uncle Douglas, we’re going to cross the mountain and go home – on some straight highway.”

I’m as good as my word so I started buying up whatever maple thing came my way.  Maple cotton candy?  You betcha!  Maple cream?  Sure – that looks creamy.  Standing in line and reaching the front I smile and say, “I’ll take two dozen maple donuts.”  ThInking how fun it will be to take a dozen home to the freezer to surprise my Dad next time he’s in town for a visit.

“That’ll be two hours wait for two dozen.”

That’s alright.  I’m here at the cash register.  I’ve waited my time.  I can roll with this.  “I’ll take one dozen then,” I tell her.

“One hour.”

My eyebrows raise and London and I sort of share a laugh or a smirk or a something and I say, with much less confidence, “Six donuts please?”

And she smiles and says, “Sure – they’re right here.”

Of course it was the fact that we were hungry.  The fact that we were grateful to not be on a curvy road.  The fact that we wanted our maple reward.  The fact that we were all realizing this day was more of a maple mess than a maple success.  But.  Those maple donuts were absolutely the tastiest donuts I have ever consumed.

We drank our chocolate milk, shared our donuts, saved the cotton candy for later, ate hot dogs and maple flavored bbq and toured the Civil War encampment set up around the sugar camp.

It felt like a piece of what we had been looking for and I was ready to declare it Enough.

We sauntered back to the car, our bag filled with maple cinnamon buns and maple candy.  I told the kids we would visit one last sugar camp – one my dad always took us to.  We’d buy our genuine Virginia maple syrup in its ginormous jug and tell Douglas we were sorry we missed him.

And then when we reached the car I remembered the sensor’s message flashing in the car on the curvy roads.

I remembered because I finally looked at my left rear tire.

Yeah.  Somebody should definitely be checking that guy’s tire pressure.  Because.  There was no air in that left rear tire.  Or maybe it was the hill I was kind of parked on.  Surely that was it.  My tire wasn’t flat.  Just soft.  A little soft.  A gentleman was getting out of his car directly behind ours.  He stared at my tire.  “Does that look flat to you sir?” I questioned.  (I like second opinions.)  He kind of snorted.

“Yeah.”

Alright.  As there was only one single gas station in the entire town of McDowell and it was only about 100 yards away, I drove over there.

Guess what McDowell, as a town, does not possess at their gas station?

An air pump.

At that point it was all so ridiculous it was almost funny.  I stood in the center of the gas station.  I said out loud to the maple air, “I don’t think I know what to do.”

Still no phone service.  Still no Douglas.  Still me and five kids and a giant Yukon with an extremely soft left rear tire.

We did have maple cotton candy however.

I stood in the gas station and I sighed.  My mind was almost a complete blank.  And then a uniformed police officer stepped inside the gas station and I smiled.

He actually drove back home to his own house, brought back his own two personal air compressor tanks, and refilled our tire.

(While we waited, we ate the cotton candy.  I mean, why not really?)

As soon as the tire was filled it begin leaking immediately.

“You won’t be making it back to Monterrey with that tire ma’am,” he informed me.

No.  I don’t think I will.

Like magic, another fellow appeared and leant a hand as well.  My boys watched and learned and we discovered the clever little system our Yukon has to hide its spare tire.  (It unlocks with the car key.  Behind a little secret panel.  And I would have never ever known that was a thing.)

An hour later – or more – our cotton candy is gone, the officer and the helper have taken off the leaking tire, put on the spare tire, returned the jack to its home and wished me well.

I decided going to the sugar camp was a bad idea so I went right into the gas station and bought my maple syrup there and I’m pretending I was at a genuine sugar camp instead.  (When you see the syrup at my house, you better pretend too.)

We decided we were heading off that mountain to any straight road home and we pulled out of the gas station, drove about two blocks, looked to our right and you won’t even believe what we saw.

My brother.

We saw my brother.  Pushing his daughter on a swing and just standing there, being all alive and regular at the Maple Festival, two blocks away from where we’d spent the last several hours waiting beside a leaky tire.

We’re calling our day The Maple Mistake.