The Near-Cation

Newsletter 2024-08-04

It wasn’t quite a staycation, but it wasn’t a go-cation either. Let’s call it a near-cation for the sake of clarity. Shakespeare isn’t the only one who gets to make up words. Just be happy I didn’t write this newsletter in iambic pentameter. This weekend’s near-cation was a consolation prize for more distant activities that I subsequently scaled back. I had big ambitions for what I could do for my final outing with my friends and family this summer. Then I remembered I’m old, tired, and cheap, the three building blocks of any healthy personality. The near-cation was a solid reminder that I don’t need to travel great distances to disappoint my children. I can do it at a discount much closer to home.

Back in February, my wife and I sat down and wrote out all the things we wanted to get done through the start of August. It was an exhausting list. She got a hand cramp writing it out, and I had to take a nap halfway through. The final item on that itinerary was a rail bike trip. Our board game friends, Delilah and Peter, discovered a rail bike course in Iowa, by which I mean they were hit with a targeted ad. Facebook tells us what we like and not the other way round. I liked the idea of a rail bike trip and added it to the schedule to finish off my children’s final days out of school. The plan was to drive to Iowa and spend the night. The next day, we’d do the rail bike course, which would involve taking two four-person quad bikes down several miles of scenic, abandoned tracks. Cardio is only tolerable if you have pretty things to look at to distract you. To fill out the weekend, I planned to find local time-wasting activities that we never do closer to home but are necessary on the road to keep bored children from murdering each other. I put go-karts, arcades, and bowling in that category. They aren’t entertaining enough to do if I have access to my own house, but they’re better than listening to my children fighting in a hotel room. I will always pay a premium for silence.

We waited to book our hotel. Spending money is the worst part of any trip, other than all the other parts, which are pretty bad, too. As always, procrastinating was the right move. We found a rail trail offered by the same company, but a few hours closer in Kentucky. We delayed some more. We found yet another course, this one right here in Indianapolis. We wouldn’t need to stay overnight after all. That would save us hundreds of dollars and eliminate the need to pack. It would also diminish the outing to the point where it wasn’t really a vacation. It would be more of an errand. It felt like a failure to retract the scope of the adventure so severely. I didn’t want to disappoint my children, even though they’d lost track of all the things I planned for us to do and were only half-listening when I told them in the first place. That’s still fifty percent more listening than usual. I decided we would switch to the close rail bike trail but follow it up with the minor time and money-wasting activities we would have done to fill the day if we were in another state. In this case, that would include mini golf, an arcade, and ice cream. Not that ice cream is ever a waste, but I’d prefer to buy it at a grocery store where it comes in gallons. Anything less is just a tease. Keep your two scoops and hand me the bucket.

My plan came with an early start Friday. To get there on time, the kids had to wake up at 6 a.m.. That’s five hours earlier than what they’ve been used to this summer. The key to any not quite-a-vacation vacation is to start out exhausted. We picked up Peter and Delilah, filling our amazing minivan to its maximum capacity, and drove to Lola’s parents’ house. Step one of this family and friends vacation was to abandon two-thirds of my family right off the bat. The rail bike place wasn’t able to give us a second rail bike for the day we all took off work. They promised to contact me if any of the other group reservations canceled, but none did. The next best thing was to leave my children with my in-laws for the first two hours of the near-cation. My girls are old enough that they don’t need a babysitter if Lola and I are out for the day, but we wanted them close by for all the other things we were going to do in that quadrant of the city. Lola’s parents live a short drive from the rail bike trail. We dropped off the kids with their body weight in doughnuts and continued on to the rails. The children got the better end of that deal. I’ll take all of the junk food and none of the exercise any day of the week.

We arrived at the rail trail half an hour early like we’d been instructed. We killed time on the train platform by playing cornhole as the other groups trickled in. It proved to be the most exciting part of the outing. Lola was surprisingly good at throwing bags through a hole and should probably start hustling people for money. Once everyone was there, we realized there were three rail bikes left over, even though the company had told us they were all booked up. The most likely explanations are that they don’t have enough staffing to run them all at once or they keep a few in reserve at all times in case the other vehicles break down. Either that or they’d heard of my children and made up excuses so we couldn’t bring them. There are downsides to sharing my family’s worst secrets online. The rail bike trip was solidly okay. We rode four miles down some tracks. We waited at a turnaround point while sweat bees mobbed us and a worker rotated the seats. Then we rode four miles back. It’s possible I would have been more impressed by the experience if I was in an area I was less familiar with. Instead, I stared at the same Indiana soybean fields I see every other day of my life, but this time while doing light cardio. It was a fine activity, but I’m glad I didn’t drive five hours and book two hotel rooms for two nights to do it. It would have been more fun if we were allowed to ram other rail bikes, but the workers specifically banned that. They really did know me. Their lame policy cost them an amazing business opportunity. I would have traveled any distance to do a rail bike demolition derby.

Photo by Tungsten Rising on Unsplash

After finishing the course, we piled in my minivan to pick up the kids for the family portion of the day. We went to a mini golf place that we’ve been driving by for years without so much as slowing down. We picked the wrong day to finally stop. The place was completely packed. The Colts’ training camp was happening nearby, and the miniature course was flooded with fans in blue jerseys. I guess they needed a break from watching other people exercise. We signed up for eighteen holes anyway because we were already there, which is the only reason I do anything. We split into two groups, with the four kids going in front of us and the four adults following close behind. I gave my brood their own scorecard to keep track of their strokes. It’s like it was my first day as a parent. To the shock of no one, there were tears by hole five. The kids argued about how many strokes they had and what was written down. By hole six, I threw their scorecard in a trash can. That helped. Without any way to quantify a winner, the kids could focus on better activities, like hitting their balls into a fake stream over and over again. Miniature golf was always meant to be a water sport.

Even then, their attention spans soon wore out. It wasn’t entirely their fault. Golf, even in its smallest form, should end around hole fourteen. Going any further is an exercise in self-punishment. The kids were bored well before the end. It was approximately a thousand degrees outside, and they wanted to be anywhere else. I felt the same, but I was also the one who paid, so we played it out. I technically won among the adults, depending on how you count penalty strokes and handle drops after you blast a ball off the fairway and into a ditch one property over. The kids’ match remained unscored, which meant they all won, or, more accurately, lost. They were on the verge of collapsing from hunger and thirst, which they were eager to tell me repeatedly in a tone that wasn’t at all annoying. The massive quantities of doughnuts from a few hours before had completely worn off. We had to get to a restaurant right away for an emergency injection of chicken tenders. It was a matter of life and death.

Never mind that my kids can have chicken nuggets at our house any time they want. They get a special joy from having someone in a restaurant kitchen microwave the same thing for a five hundred percent markup. Since literally every restaurant has chicken fingers, we let someone else pick the place. My fourteen-year-old, Betsy, chose a sit-down burger restaurant that serves a chili she likes. That seemed seasonally appropriate for the ninety degree day. We had a party of eight, so it took us a while to be seated. We spent that time wandering the neighborhood looking at houses and stores while the kids gave me frequent updates on how close they were to starvation. Finally, we got a table. The food was good and not as expensive as at some other places. The one downside was we were seated outside. Air conditioning remained beyond our grasp, but not for long. Our next stop was exclusively indoors, which I thought might solve all our problems. It did for the kids, but not for me. Welcome to the arcade.

This is a section where I wish I was worse at math. The numbers physically hurt me. When I calculate how much I spent on game credits for everybody, I could have taken my whole family to an amusement park. Worse, the kids wasted most of those credits on thinly-disguised gambling machines that turned dollars into pennies in the form of tickets. The thousands of tickets they earned translated into roughly three dollars worth of plastic and sugar at the prize redemption center. Still, the kids were elated, so I should take the win. I finally found the threshold for how much money I have to spend to make my kids happy. The one exception was my ten-year-old, Lucy. She’s my most consistent videogame buddy on Halo nights. There’s a Halo sequel only available in this chain of arcades. For months, I’ve promised we’d get over there sometime to complete it. Friday was that day. We sat down together for close to an hour and played through the whole thing, wasting a huge amount of credits in the process. For all we spent finishing it, we almost could have bought a video game at full retail price. But it was about the experience, not the money. We had created a memory she could treasure for the rest of her life. At least that’s what I thought. She had fun while playing the game, but at the end, she was mostly just sad that she didn’t get any tickets while her sisters were winning big on the child slot machines. I gave her the rest of my game credits so she could go gamble with her sisters. I made sure we spent everything on the game cards and used up all the redemption tickets because we are never going back. That’s what vacations (and near-cations) are all about: having once-in-a-lifetime experiences that are only once-in-a-lifetime because you know better than to ever go back.

We ended the day by going to Peter and Delilah’s house for what they termed a toddler dinner. We had giant bags of chicken nuggets and fried mozzarella sticks that they’ve had in their deep freeze for forever and wanted to use up. My family is great for finishing off your lowest quality food. After dinner, I took the kids home so they could play on their phones, which is always their favorite part of the day. There was a second day to our non-vacation vacation, but Peter and Delilah tapped out. It’s hard to put up with that much of me. I took the kids to a cheap roller skating place in the middle of nowhere followed by a free petting zoo and a stop and a local ice cream place. It cost a fraction of day one but was far more fun, at least for me because it came without the financial trauma. It was proof you don’t have to travel far or spend a lot of money to have a good time. Next year, we’ll have even more fun by just staying home.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James