No Plans

Our days were fairly well planned on the Colorado trip. Although we left some wiggle room for spur of the moment things. For example, we discovered there was a Bluegrass Festival in Telluride and that sounded like fun, but it was sold out. While there was to be one free concert, we assumed that attending that would be a bit like walking into a bear pit. We also wanted to ride the train from Durango to Silverton. Everyone who's done it absolutely raves about it. But it turns out we didn't buy our tickets far enough in advance. No availability on the days we could go. At least not at the price we were willing to pay. VIP service may have been available but that train isn't cheap to begin with and there is no senior discount! A regular ticket is $90. I just can't imagine what happens to make the VIP ticket worth more than that.

But it was just as well because the morning we'd wanted to go (Tuesday) we woke up to a flat tire on our Jeep. We wouldn't have been able to get to the train anyway and we'd have bought those non-refundable tickets for nothing. But we no longer had to worry about what we were going to do on Tuesday. While they were replacing the tire, we found out that the brakes needed replacing. Great find! You really don't want to be towing an RV down a mountain with dodgy brakes. Unfortunately, they couldn't schedule us in for a brake job until Thursday, the day we'd planned to leave. No problem. We would just be a little later getting started than what we planned.

That left us with Wednesday with no specific plans. We had pretty much decided to just kick back that day - do a bit of walking and reading. Instead we got to look for someone who did emergency dental work. Mark started the phoning. "I wondered if you might have an appointment available today? OK, thank you." Too business-like.

I said, "Give me the phone. You are not going to get anywhere like that. You need a desperate edge in your voice."

In this type of situation, you've got to play the desperate card, be the damsel in distress (I understand he can't do damsel in distress - at least not without losing his man card). While women are more resistant to damsels in distress, you have to appeal to their sense of "you know what men are like! - help me!" to get the desired response. I finally found a dentist who agreed to see him at 3 PM. By that time, we had 40 minutes to get there and it was a 45 minute drive. But we got there, the problem got fixed and I could look forward to a pleasant journey home. (Seriously! You know what men are like!) So much for kicking back and relaxing.

But here's the take away - always have plans! Fun plans. If you have no specific plans for a day, events will conspire against you and you will be forced to do things that are not fun.