A Rip Roaring Good Time (2 page)

"We ain't getting any younger, you know. Aren't you about ready to hit the road?" I asked Clyde "Rip" Ripple, my husband of nearly fifty years.

"Don't get your bloomers in a bunch, my dear. All I need to do is get the jacks cranked up and the antenna cranked down, and we'll be ready to roll. We have plenty of time to get to the Alexandria Inn in time for the party."

"Well, get to cranking, buster. I'm anxious to get the Chartreuse Caboose on the road." I had nicknamed our RV this after we'd hand-painted it chartreuse one weekend in a fit of boredom. We'd highlighted it with a few scattered yellow sunflowers for a little added flare. If nothing else, it was easy to locate in a crowded campground.

We'd already eaten breakfast and, as usual, I heard a chorus of snap, crackle and pops before I'd even poured the milk on our cereal. It was just part of being a senior citizen, as was the prune juice we drank to wash down the whole-wheat toast that completed our morning meal. Bacon, eggs and pancakes loaded down with butter and maple syrup had gone by the wayside when our cholesterol levels achieved "walking time bomb" status. They were just a fantasy now, as were a lot of other things we'd always enjoyed in our younger days. Even our sex drives were more often in "park" than not. Still, for both being sixty-eight years old, we felt we had a lot more active lifestyle than most folks did at our age. We made sure there was never any room on our schedule for bingo and potluck dinners, staples of many senior citizens' social lives.

Rip and I, Rapella Ripple, are full-time RV enthusiasts, crisscrossing the country in our thirty-foot travel trailer. We both retired at sixty-two years old, the earliest we could and still draw our social security benefits. Rip spent his entire career in law enforcement, first as a beat cop, then as a detective, followed by seven years as the Chief of Police in our south Texas hometown of Rockport. He ended his career by serving ten years as the Sheriff of Aransas County.

I, on the other hand, have had a vast array of full- and part-time positions involving dozens of different occupations. It's not that I'm a high-maintenance, incompetent, or difficult employee; it's just that I bore easily. I've quickly tired of doing everything from pitching magazine subscriptions, where I made random phone calls and was rudely hung up on ninety-nine out of every hundred calls before I could even spit out a full sentence, to working as a clerk at a stained glass art gallery, where the "You break it, you buy it" policy applied more often to me than to the customers.

My favorite occupation was short-lived—a taste-testing job at a local ice cream factory, which I was forced to quit when I developed both lactose intolerance and a double chin. But lest you think I'm flaky or unreliable, of all of the many jobs I've had, I've only actually been fired once. And that was due to an unpleasant customer I was serving at a local restaurant. For some reason, she took it personally when I referred to her rowdy young son as an obnoxious spoiled brat who should be put in time-out until he graduated from college. Let's face it, some people are entirely too sensitive.

We found retirement to be less than it was cracked up to be after a full year of sitting on the couch staring at a TV, speaking to each other only briefly during commercials. Fortunately, we could watch the same shows every other month and not remember whether we'd seen them before. The most excitement we were apt to have in an entire week was visiting a nearby park to feed the seagulls, at least until one of us felt the need to go home and take a nap.

When it finally dawned on us that our rear ends were beginning to take root in the plaid fabric cushions of our couch, we decided enough was enough. After all, we were retired, not dead.

Within a month, we had sold our home, given away most of our belongings, purchased a travel trailer, and hit the road. We made no plans, followed no schedule, just let each day take us wherever it might take us, which, on a number of occasions, was less than fifteen miles down the road.

Sometimes we moved daily from one RV Park to another, and from one state to another, when we got a wild hair up our rear-ends. At other times, we would rest a spell and recharge our batteries—and I mean
ours
, not that of our trailer, or the truck we used to tow it with—and we'd stay in one park for several months at a time.

We would often work as what is commonly referred to as "workampers", a name derived from a popular magazine that helped pair campgrounds with RVers willing to work there for various forms of compensation. We'd receive free site rent in exchange for helping in the RV Park office, cleaning shower houses, doing lawn work or whatever needed to be done. As you'll no doubt come to realize, "free" is my favorite word. Occasionally we're even paid a small chunk of change on top of free rent, which comes in handy with the outlandish price of gas these days.

But right now we actually had a schedule to keep. In the Cozy Camping RV Park in Cheyenne, Wyoming, just a couple of weeks prior, we'd met Lexie Starr, her husband, Stone Van Patten, and her daughter, Wendy. Lexie and Stone were celebrating their one-year anniversary during Cheyenne Frontier Days. When another camper was found murdered, Lexie and Wendy had become involved in the case, and I'd ended up involved as well, to the extent that we three gals nearly bit the big one in the process of discovering the identity of the killer. Two days after our new friends headed home to the Alexandria Inn, a bed and breakfast establishment they own in Rockdale, Missouri, I'd received a phone call from Lexie. That call resulted in Rip and me preparing to head east in order to attend a thirtieth surprise party for Wendy at their inn.

There was an RV repairman in Rockdale who worked at a station called Boney's Garage. We'd arranged to have him do some repairs on our trailer while we were there. Lexie had insisted we stay at the inn as their guests while our trailer was in the shop. Along with the word "free," I was also quite fond of its cousin, "guest." My favorite thing about being sixty-eight was the senior citizen discount that came with it.

Less than an hour later, we had Wyoming in our rearview mirror as we crossed over the Nebraska border. I had a feeling this trip would turn out to be one we wouldn't soon forget. Call it a premonition, or just a fit of fancy, but it was a feeling I couldn't shake. I was anxiously looking forward to finding out if there was anything to my anticipation, because boredom was nipping at our heels once again, and I was more than ready for a little excitement.

* * *

"According to this GPS thingy you bought yourself for our last anniversary, we are only a mile and a half from Rockdale. How can that be?" I asked Rip. I'd barely gotten my seat belt on, for goodness sakes.

"We pulled out of Cozy Camping forty-five seconds ago, dear. We're over six hundred miles from our destination. And, as you know, that's about twice what I like to drive in one day, so we'll pull over in a campground in Kearney tonight."

"Now it says we're only a mile from Rockdale," I insisted. As usual, I was pretty much just tuning out Rip's side of our conversation, as he nearly always did with me, too. "What kind of silly contraption is that thing, anyway?"

"Sweetheart, that isn't the distance to Rockdale. It's indicating that we're to stay on College Drive for a mile before taking the ramp on the right onto I-80 East."

"You couldn't have figured out yourself that we needed to go east on I-80 without that thing telling you? Ask me next time. I'd have been happy to inform you that if you went west on I-80 you'd end up in Utah, not Missouri. I could have saved you about a hundred bucks."

"Then we won't turn again until we reached Lincoln. We'll be in Nebraska all day," my husband explained patiently, as if I'd never spoken. As I suspected, not only had he tuned me out completely, he likely didn't have his hearing aids in either. For some reason, he found them unnecessary when there was no one around but me.

Rip often said it was fortunate that he had the patience of a saint, and I had to admit he was probably right. But the GPS thingy still made no sense whatsoever to me. We'd been traveling around the country for six years. I couldn't recall driving around in circles, hopelessly lost,
before
Rip bought the GPS device. But I could remember a number of times
since
he's had it that the female voice has had him backtracking, making illegal U-turns and driving down dead-end streets while she'd been "recalculating" her butt off the entire time. Worst of all, she had him doing all this as he was driving to a location he'd driven straight to a hundred times before without her assistance. I didn't bring this up to Rip, however, knowing he wasn't paying a lick of attention to me anyway. Knowing him, he'd have only replied, "I thought maybe she knew a better way to get there."

"So why does your gadget say it's six-thirty? My watch reads ten o'clock."

"That's not the current time, dear. It's the E.T.A, estimated time of arrival, if we were to drive all the way to Rockdale, Missouri, tonight. I estimate we'll be arriving in Kearney around two-thirty, just in time for our three o'clock highball."

"Well, I'm all for that, but I think this GPS doo-dad was a waste of good money. It's too complicated, like that cell phone we've tried to use and can't even figure out how to call anyone on. Well, except for the time when you butt-dialed everyone on the contact list. It was the same day you accidentally placed a call to the Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin."

"Yes, and if his secretary had put me through to him, I'd have had plenty to say to him. He needs a comeuppance, and I'm just the guy to give it to him."

"No doubt. Yesterday you talked to the fellow sacking our groceries for ten minutes about his haircut. By the time we got to the car, the ice cream was dripping out the little hole in the plastic bag. All I can say is, thank God Wal-Mart has such a liberal return policy on both Ben and Jerry's
and
cell phones."

"Sometimes I just like to be friendly. And I am not returning that phone, Rapella. We need to figure out how to use it. After all, we are two of the last remaining dinosaurs in existence who aren't totally tethered to their cell phones. Plus, it would be handy to be able to call and make reservations at RV parks from the road, you know. How many times have we driven miles out of our way to get to an RV Park with no vacancies? Cell phones are almost a must these days. And very handy in emergencies too, I'm sure."

"Fine. Whatever. It took you three months to figure out this silly GPS thing, so you'd best get started figuring out the cell phone right now if you want to learn how to use it while you're still on the right side of the grass."

Without replying, Rip put on the blinker as he gradually merged onto the I-80 exit ramp. He awkwardly extracted the cell phone from his front pants pocket and placed it in the center console. In the past, he'd nearly caused several pileups trying to get the ringing phone out of his jeans pocket while driving down the road. He'd drop it on the floorboard and weave from lane to lane trying to pick it back up. Then, instead of answering the phone, he'd nearly always hang up on the caller. It was like watching a toddler trying to operate the controls of a fighter jet; a lot of clueless button pushing with no idea what might happen as a result.

Even though I was basically talking to myself, I continued. "But I guess the GPS gadget was your anniversary gift, and if you like the over-priced toy, so be it. If you splurged this much for our forty-ninth, how much do you intend to blow on our upcoming golden anniversary?"

"Fiftieth anniversaries are rare these days, sweetheart. For that matter, marriages in general are rare these days. Stone and Lexie got me thinking about you and me taking a special vacation to celebrate the big occasion," Rip said. Funny how his hearing problem cleared up when the topic veered toward something he was interested in.

"But we're basically on vacation 24/7 now. We've been all over the country already. Where could we go that would be special? You know I don't trust airplanes as far as I can throw up in them. And I wouldn't feel safe on any foreign soil in this day and age. That old adage, there's no place like home, is especially true now. Because in so many other countries you'd have a target on your back and be lucky you weren't blown to smithereens when you stepped off the plane onto the tarmac. I don't understand why we all can't just get along. Live and let be, I've always said." I loved the open road, but the friendly skies were a whole different ball of wax.

"I agree wholeheartedly with you about traveling outside the good ol' USA right now, with turmoil and havoc taking place all around the globe," Rip said. "But we can't let the threat of terrorism keep us from living our lives to the fullest and doing the things we enjoy. If we do, the cowards win! For all we know, there could be a sleeper cell of extremists planning an attack right here in Rockdale, as we speak. But even so, the chances of being taken out by a terrorist are still relatively remote."

"You're absolutely right, Rip! I'm more apt to get killed in the H.E.B parking lot than I am by a suicide bomber. It's like negotiating your way through a mine field sometimes. I can't tell you how many times, while loading groceries in the truck, I've nearly been mowed down by stressed-out soccer moms chauffeuring a dozen kids around in their SUV's, fifteen-year old boys with brand new learner's permits, and even senile old ladies with glaucoma in one eye and macular degeneration in the other."

I might as well have been talking to the air conditioner vent for all the attention Rip was paying to me. He tended to have a one-track mind, so I listened as Rip continued expressing his plans for our anniversary trip.