This is going to be long, but I wanted to share my recently delivered speech with you all. It was a 7-8 minute story-telling speech and I thought it was pretty funny. Anyway, if you have time to kill, here goes:
Have you ever heard someone use the phrase, “the vacation from hell?” I mean, I have, and I always wonder what exactly people mean by it. Maybe all of their best laid plans went awry, or perhaps they were forced to deal with horrible neighbors or horrible bugs, or…both. You never know until you hear their story, right?
Well, a number of years ago, I went on a vacation with my family and some close relatives, but it definitely wasn’t the vacation from hell. I like to think there is just the tiniest bit of excitement in a vacation from hell. You know, like catastrophes or lakes of fire and brimstone, things like that. No no, our vacation was much worse than that, at least in the mind of a 15 year old boy. Ours was like a vacation from Purgatory - our vacation was BORING.
Now just so you know, there is a difference between boring and BORING. Boring is when you are sitting in class and the professor is going on and on about the various merits of the mating habits of phytoplankton. It’s tough, and you may want to die, but you know that sweet release is only thirty minutes away. BORING has more of a sense of hopelessness to it. BORING is when you arrive at your vacation spot, go out to the beach, and realize you will be spending an entire week on an island inhabited by the Obese Retired Persons Association of America.
Now this island is called Jekyll Island and it sits just off the coast of Georgia. The spot was chosen by my Grandmother, who heard it was a great place from one of her friends. Now for some reason, none of us stopped to think about what kind of friends my grandmother has – namely, OLD. Too late, we realized we had made a huge mistake… or at least we had according to me and my cousin Arthur. Arthur and I are close in age and have been good friends all our lives. We had been through good times and bad times, but this time we were in over our heads. We fought a foe we could neither see nor hear, but one as deadly as any a boy can face – boredom.
When we realized that we would surely die if we allowed ourselves to be sucked in to the listless lounging that my grandmother calls vacationing, we knew we had to save ourselves. We grabbed our flip flops and our flower-printed “boardshorts” and headed down the beach in hopes of a miracle. And what a miracle we found.
About 2 miles down the beach, there was a small public bathhouse-type area, complete with one of those ugly white price-gouging concession stands. As we approached, we noticed with despair that there was NO ONE there, except for the two girls who worked inside. Wait, this was it! Two girls! We rubbed our eyes to make sure it wasn’t a mirage. It was true – they were girls, there were two of them, and they appeared to be about our age.
This was more than we could have hoped. We pumped ourselves up and went to the little ordering window. “Been keeping busy?” I said, putting on my sly half-smile. (Girls love humor) One looked at me with a straight face and said in the thickest of Georgia accents, “Nope. Not too many people out there today.” I smiled bleakly at this outrageous understatement. There was NO ONE there. She seemed to be serious, and they accent was just one “y’all” short of too much, but I let it slide. I mean, we’re generous people and after all, we beggars can’t really be choosers, now can we?
Arthur and I hung out with these girls for most of the day. We found out interesting facts, like their names were Wendy and Jade, they lived on the mainland about 20 minutes away, and they had worked at this stand for 3 years now. We definitely resisted commenting on that and told them our story. When they heard that we were bored, they whispered to each other, then turned to us and asked: “Do y’all like to party?”
Of course we liked to party. I mean, I’m sure we would, if we had ever been to a party (what, we were 15, we couldn’t drive. How were we supposed to get to a party?). When you’re faced with a question like that, coming from possibly the only source of entertainment on the entire island for a week, you answer in the affirmative. “Well, tonight we’re going to be at the Tiki Hut at the Holiday Inn down at the bottom of the island. Y’all can meet us there and we’ll go out.”
The plans were set. Our entertainment secured. Now all we had to do was go home and play the waiting game. We went back to the beach house, formulated our late night excursion and finally, it was time to leave. “We’re going for a run around the island tonight,” we told our parents. “We’ll be back later.” Sometimes parents don’t think about things, like why boys would need jeans and polo shirts to go for a late night run. Eh, whatever. Anyway, so we headed out the door and started jogging to the bottom of the island.
“How far is it to the bottom of the island?” Arthur asked, after we had been jogging for 20 minutes. I tried to think back to when we were driving to our beach house. “Let’s see, if the bridge is right about at the middle of the island, and it took us about 10 minutes to get from the bridge to our beach house, I’d say it’s….probably ten miles.” Oh crap. That’s going to take forever. We can’t jog all the way down there… we’re already late. So we did the only smart thing there was to do: try to hitch a ride with strangers in the middle of the night.
And boy did we find one. A beat-up old pickup truck pulled off and we walked up to it. An old man with a straw hat sat behind the wheel. It was dark, but we could tell that the man was pretty tan. “¿Hacia dónde vas?” Nope, not tan – Hispanic. We pointed in the direction and he pointed to the bed of his truck. Dangerous? Maybe. Stupid? Probably? Better than going back home to watch the Weather Channel? Definitely.
We hopped in and he took off. As we passed the miles of bleak road, we thought to ourselves: “Man, I’m glad we didn’t have to run the whole way.” Finally we saw the sign of the Promised Land: Holiday Inn. We banged on the top of the cab and he pulled into the parking lot. We thanked our Hispanic savior and he drove off into the night. This is it – our awesome destination. I wonder where the Tiki Hut is. What is a Tiki Hut anyway?
We went around back to look around, and we saw Wendy and Jade walking briskly toward us. “Come on and get in the car!” said Jade. We did an about face and got into the back of Jade’s “hooptie.” Yeah, they called the car a “hooptie” the whole time and we just nodded our heads in fear that was a real term that we should actually know. Jade wasted no time in leaving the Holiday Inn and we were back on the road.
We soon discovered why we had left. Wendy and Jade’s idea of “partying” was stealing mini wine bottles from the Tiki Hut and taking them back to their place, giddy with accomplishment. After a few more crazy adventures, they eventually dropped us off at our beach house and we went to bed with the knowledge that we were pretty much the coolest guys we knew. That week turned out to be a blast, with plenty more stories for me to tell, but I think we have some sort of time limit here.
I guess what I want you to take away from this is that sometimes you have to make your own fun. Life can deal you lemons, but there’s nothing to stop you from making lemonade. Or you can use the lemons as baseballs to hit with a piece of driftwood… whatever floats your boat. Anyway, we took a chance and turned a vacation from Purgatory into a nice little seven minute speech. | 
