The first thing I did was spill orange juice down the front of myself and had to change completely. Not Preschooler D -- me. Then we hit the road for Deadwood. Now besides being a summer retreat for Kevin Costner, Deadwood is home to site of the shooting of Wild Bill Hickok. I remember visiting there as a child and oohing and ahhing the story of Wild Bill buying the farm while he played cards. The boys were going to love this, thought I.
Wrong. Couldn't have been wronger. They didn't even want to get out of the car much less trudge straight uphill to visit a grave in a cemetery. They were promised lunch and away we went whining all the way.
After paying our respects we set off to find lunch.
Deadwood, as you may or may not know, has legalized gambling. A lovely thing, perhaps, if you and your spouse are driving through Deadwood in your convertible on a summer retirement tour of the Western states. It is a miserable thing if you are trying to feed a teenager and a preschooler because Deadwood is full of gambling, bars, shooting reenactments and Kevin Costner movie memorabilia, but not much else. After wandering around for a while we finally found a place to sit outdoors and eat a hamburger.
Brent's had mushrooms.
Now normally, this wouldn't be a problem but somewhere along the four hour drive in the middle of nowhere to our next stop those mushrooms turned on my poor husband. Somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. It was probably the longest 30 minutes of my life as I tried to decide if I should pull over and let the ambulance find us or keep driving until I reached the hospital.
Fortunately I didn't have to do either one. He recovered admirably and was even able to come along to our last stop of the trip, the Medora Musical. I like the Medora Musical. It's fun. There's singing. There's dancing. There's steak on a pitchfork. It's good, clean fun. It's outside. You park on a grassy hill. A grassy hill where they have used sharp, pointy rocks to outline the parking area. And you back in. Back in to the sharp, pointy rocks. With your BRAND NEW AUTOMOBILE.
I was so mad, I could not speak. Poor Brent, still recovering from his mushrooms, dragged me and the boys down to the amphitheatre while he whispered encouraging things about insurance. I could not speak. I could not cry. I just marched along.
Then my husband of 17+ years, my husband who knows me so well, spotted a pink cowboy hat for sale with a shiny crown attached. He knew, no matter how long that day had been, I could not resist a shiny pink cowboy hat.
And, indeed, I could not. Sitting there for the second half of the musical, hat on my head, boys at my side I thought, "How lucky can a girl get?"
