What a trip

We're going on vacation! Finally!

Our long-planned trip to Chicago has been somewhat abbreviated, though. You know, gas prices and all that. Whatever.

Anyway, we're going to...

(drumroll, please)

Branson.

Yee-hawwww!!!

Yeah, I know. Cornball City. But we haven't had a vacation since Britt was born, so I'm excited to be going anywhere. If Branson is the best I can get, I'll take it. Britt's really excited, too, but she still doesn't have a good grasp on the concept of time. She thinks we're going on "bacation" today, right now, "in two minutes!" (holding up two fingers).

Mostly we'll be taking Britt to Silver Dollar City and Celebration City on a three-day City Hopper pass. Mikey found a Beatles tribute show that's supposed to be really good. And there's a zoo up the road at Springfield and a drive-through wildlife park somewhere around there. Hopefully, that will be enough keep us busy, because there isn't a whole lot else I could find that sounds very interesting.

Of course, Mikey won't agree to take a full seven days off because the store just can't do without him, but I did manage to bump him up from three days to four. I'm still working on him for five.

The biggest problem, though, is that his OCD is off the charts right now. He's having serious cleanliness issues. If you haven't been around him in a while, you'd be amazed. My nightmare is that we'll get to our hotel room and Mikey will take a look around and refuse to stay there. And then we'll have to find someplace else to go and lose our deposit and all that crap. And no guarantee that anyplace else will be clean enough either. He says he's been worried about that, too, so I've been studying hotel reviews for the past two days, trying to find a place that's clean enough to suit him.

Restaurants are a problem, too. We took Cathy and Mom to Outback the night before Cathy's knee surgery because that's where she wanted to go. The booth they seated us at had rice on the seat, so he made us get up and go to a different restaurant. It was really embarrassing. And one night, he went out to get us some Sonic burgers and came back with McDonald's instead. The next morning, I was putting Britt in her carseat in the back of his car when I found a bag full of Sonic food. He said he'd studied the cook staff through the window while he was waiting for the food and decided there was no way he could let us eat it.

So, this trip could either be a lot of fun or it could be an agonizing ordeal. The betting pool opens now.

Unless he backs out on me again, and then all bets are off.