The Griswold's Go to the Beach

Being married to a carpenter has it's advantages and disadvantages. If you've ever heard the expresion, "The cobbler's wife has no shoes", yeah that's pretty much us, except in all honesty I have some really nice shoes. John got a wild hair a few months ago and decided to build kayaks. He started in on the first one and asked a few days into it, it I would like it. I later found out that this was so he could iron out the mistakes on mine and his would be better looking. I don't care, I have a custom made kayak, no over head light or finished ceiling in my bedroom, but I am now the proud owner of a custom kayak. Open cockpit, light enough for me to carry alone, I get to name it (I think "Ship" is what I'm going with), and chose the color.

John finished up his kayak a week before we left for vacation, this past Saturday, he launched it on Thursday and was MORE than pleased with himself when it didn't take on water or sink. Now the dilemma, we don't have roof racks OR kayak holders. No problem for Mr. Crafty, a.k.a. John, he took 4 rachet straps and made roof racks by wrapping them through the inside of the car and over, then made the kayak holders out of wood and foam. While describing this to me I really thought that my husband was brillant, and was picturing a lower tech version of this. I had NO idea that what I was actually going to get was THIS!

OK, not the end of the world, I mean after we all we are driving the beat up car and it's only a 2.5 hour drive. Pride swallowed.

Saturday morning we load up the car. We decided to take John's car since it has more trunk space and that is a high commodity when 3 adults and a cloth diapered baby are traveling in one vehicle on vacation for a week. Everything had to be done in a specific order, trunk loaded, kayaks loaded, then the bikes put on. Oh, did I mention that we decided to take our bikes? Two cross-over mountain bikes, WITH a baby seat attached. John's modelesque cousin models the beauty of the vehicle that will transport to a week at the beach.

Besides looking like idiots driving to the beach, there was a serious flaw in the plan; rain. The faux roof racks bent the rubber casing around the door and when it started raining the rain came in the car. It came in the door and ran down the ratchet straps and dripped all over us both. We grabbed napkins and tried to prevent any further dribbles to no avail, as they were saturated almost immediately. We pulled into a drugstore to buy some papertowels, while in there decided that something with some more absorbance might be better, bonus if it has adhesive, yup, maxi pads. They weren't pretty, but did the job. We went through 17 of them in 2 hours, but were nice and dry with a great story.