“10,000 Miles, 24 Water parks, 10 Stitches to the Head, and
3 Bathing Suits Later”
by Barbara Brown
We toured the United States by water park, my ten-year-old daughter and
I. We set off on a wild ride to slide our way across America. So, people ask, just
how does a family decide to spend a summer crossing the U.S. by water park?
In Alaska, where we live, nobody would blink if we decided to kayak across the
Bering Strait, but water parks? Did we decide to visit water parks first or were
the water parks just the excuse for traveling cross-country? I mean, were the
water parks the reason?
Obviously, they don’t know water parks. To know a water park is to be
first on line at 9:30 a.m., last out of the water at 8 p.m., and to be incredibly
irritated if they’re only open till 6. It’s to save showering for home later so it
doesn’t subtract from your available water park time. It’s to find, at the end of the
day, that the crowds have thinned out and you can run up the stairs and jump on
the slide right away – no line. So you do it over and over again. Zip up the stairs
and whirl down; zip up, whirl down.
Which is how this particular story gets started. Sophie and I are in Florida
on our first big marathon of the trip: seven water parks in seven days. We have
ditched my mother with Aunt Selma and Uncle Howie in West Palm Beach, and
we have finished Water park #6 (Coconut Cove) and Water park #7 (Rapids).
This is now serious water parking. No more Colonial Williamsburg, no more
butterfly conservatories. We have many water parks and many miles to go.
We drive to Orlando and make it to Wet ‘n Wild just in time for the
“10,000 Miles, 24 Water parks, 10 Stitches to the Head, and 3 Bathing Suits
Later”
© 2007 Barbara Brown
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discounted evening hours. Now it’s the big time. Disney. Typhoon Lagoon.
Blizzard Beach. We have traveled all the way from Alaska – sweated through
forty more degrees of temperature than anyone should ever need – to get to
Blizzard Beach. We have heard of the Typhoon Lagoon wave pool: twenty-foothigh walls of water. We’re warned to hold hands.
But the Typhoon Lagoon parking lot is already closed! Apparently other
people think 100 degrees is a good reason to head for a water park. But we
can’t just come back another day, we have slides to run, parks to visit.
“If I sneak in and find a spot, does that mean we can stay?” I ask the man.
“Sure, you’re welcome to try,” and in we go. Sophie moves aside some
cones, we turn left here and there, and we find a spot. Somewhere in the vast
Disney World land of parked cars, we have found a spot. We will never find it
again.
There’s a giant sign at the entrance, listing the rides. Right off the bat,
looking at the picture, we eliminate the “Humunga Kowabunga” speed slides from
consideration. Sophie and I are not brave and daring. I throw up on merry-gorounds and she has asked for rides at the State Fair to be stopped so she can
get off. Neither of us likes amusement parks. We like water parks. Not water
trauma, water terror, or water nightmares.
We do the “family” raft ride, which is code for “won’t scare you.” We put
on snorkels and travel “Shark Reef.” We ride Castaway Creek and try to
remember the cute typhoony names for all the entrances. The place is so clean
“10,000 Miles, 24 Water parks, 10 Stitches to the Head, and 3 Bathing Suits
Later”
© 2007 Barbara Brown
3
we are positive they wash their sand. Then we discover the Storm Slides.
The Storm Slides are three body slides that start from one landing. To get
to the landing, you travel hill and dale through the South Pacific. There’s foliage
and wooden bridges, stairs up and stairs down. It is a nature trail jaunt to the
landing, and then you make your choice: Jib Jammer, Rudder Buster, or ….
Stern-something. I can never remember the name of that third one.
You sit down at the head of the water, in a little bubbling pool for your butt.
You wait till the red light switches to green, signaling that it’s safe to go, and you
push off, lying down. You zig left and right, gain speed, move up the side wall of
the slide. Now there’s a section of tunnel, now an open part. You’re whizzing
past trees, people, ricocheting from side to side, splashing and holding your
breath. Maybe you close your eyes, maybe you don’t. It is all very fast, very
zingy. Whoosh, whooosh, whoosh, and you’re in the splash pool at the end. The
splash pool faces a cozy set of bleachers where the other parents – the parents
who are not zinging and whooshing – wait for their kids
This is where we’re spending the tail end, line-less part of the day. We
are flying up the stairs, dropping our limp dead bodies down on the slides.
Sometimes we know which of the three is the better ride, but by now we are so
addled and our legs so noodley that we just flop into the most convenient one.
Climb, flop, slide, whizz. Again.
I don’t know why we are so tired. The stairs can’t be that bad. There are
only six or ten going up at any given section. At Splish Splash on Long Island,
“10,000 Miles, 24 Water parks, 10 Stitches to the Head, and 3 Bathing Suits
Later”
© 2007 Barbara Brown
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we zipped through 83 steps five times in the last fifteen minutes of the day. At
Rapids, I climbed 120 steps to go down Pirates Plunge, which I will never do ever
again in my whole life.
So Sophie and I decide to count the stairs for the Storm Slides. Another
Disney phenomenon: there are 153 steps, 110 going up and 43 going down, and
we didn’t even notice. No wonder our legs are like jelly.
Sophie decides we need to do a scientific experiment to see if the green
lights at the top are synchronized. I am supposed to raise my hand in the air
when my light turns green so she can see if it matches her light. (We are water
park experts; we require empirical evidence.) So I push my body up 153 steps,
plant my butt in a start zone, and watch the light. It turns green. I raise my hand.
Ugh, Sophie can’t see my hand over the dividers between the slides. My
light has already been green for a while. Something vaguely registers that my
data is no longer timely, but I stand up and wave to Sophie anyway. As I stand, I
feel the tiny bubbles in the start zone jiggle my feet. I trip over the bubbles. Or
my feet. Hard to tell.
Next thing I know, I’m flat out on the concrete, my head cracked on the
landing zone. My skull and brain are screaming. It is the most incredible pain,
and I roll into the fetal position. Which is, of course, just enough roll to start me
down the slide.
“Don’t lose consciousness!” my brain screams! “You’ll submerge at the
end and drown.” I go down that stupid slide with a cracked head. Oh, the pain! I
“10,000 Miles, 24 Water parks, 10 Stitches to the Head, and 3 Bathing Suits
Later”
© 2007 Barbara Brown
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zing and whoosh – more like flop and drag – and then I’m at the end. I stand up,
face the lifeguard and the bleachers, and cross my eyes. There is blood
everywhere. I am a blood fire hydrant.
Sophie, horrified, screams, “Mommy, all your hair dye has come out all at
once!”
I reach my hand up to my head and blood drips everywhere. I tell the
lifeguard I need a towel.
But this is Disney, so within a minute, I am in a wheelchair flying to First
Aid. The man asks me how I am and I say fine. He asks Sophie, and she cries.
I look at her. Her face looks exactly like the face she was born in, all purple and
wrinkly. Her face mesmerizes me.
The nurse asks where we’re staying. Hmmm, that’s a good question. And
which ride did it happen on? That takes some thought. I had a hard time
remembering that before. I know I was on the one to the right. Was that the Jib
Jammer or the Stern-something? Things just … elude me.
“Well, you better start remembering or your trip to the hospital will be
overnight,” says the nurse.
“Mommy, Knights Inn. Knights Inn,” Sophie whispers.
“Knights Inn,” I say.
“Jib Jammer,” she says. She is obviously counting her immediately
available parents.
“Jib Jammer,” I say. I think this will work out just fine. I ask the nurse if
“10,000 Miles, 24 Water parks, 10 Stitches to the Head, and 3 Bathing Suits
Later”
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she has a butterfly Band-Aid that will stick my head back together. She keeps
talking about stitches.
Then Sophie is back. Was she gone? Yes, she had to take the men back
to get our belongings. She has a stuffed animal and an extra-large Sprite, too.
“Where did you get all that?” I ask.
“They got it for me,” she says.
“You’re not allowed to have soda,” I remind her.
“They really wanted to get it for me,” she says. “It made them feel better.”
We change out of our bathing suits in the bathroom. My blue bathing suit
is purple now, but that’s nothing compared to my rust-colored skin. I look in the
mirror and can’t get over the quantity of dried blood everywhere. My hair is
crusty with blood, plastered with blood in all sorts of loops and curls. I smell of
blood.
So they take us off to a clinic in a van. The waiting room is full. I discover
the cell phone in my fanny pack. Tim had insisted we get a cell phone for this
trip.
“Daddy, guess what? Mommy cracked her head open and there is blood
everywhere. We’re in the hospital and she’s going to get stitches.” It occurs to
me that these cell phone conversations are punctuating our trip: “Daddy, guess
what? We got robbed and you need to send us travelers’ checks by Federal
Express.” The waiting room is laughing out loud. Sophie must be a treat on the
phone.
“10,000 Miles, 24 Water parks, 10 Stitches to the Head, and 3 Bathing Suits
Later”
© 2007 Barbara Brown
7
“No,” Sophie says. “It’s you and the nurses. When they were telling you
to keep your head dry for three days.”
“Three days?!? We are on a national water park tour! We can’t wait three
days. We’re in Orlando. We still have Tampa Bay. We can’t miss those water
parks.” Which I guess some people thought was funny. But they also wondered
where Disney put my blood. I mean, didn’t they have to close the ride because
of AIDS? Did the blood come down the slide before me? I wonder how I could
know.
The bottom line: ten stitches to my head and pain only when I smile,
frown, or wiggle my ears. They shave my hair and everything. I finally get the
doctor down to only one day out of water, and by now, I can independently
remember the name of our hotel. The van comes back for us. Oh, God, I’ll
never find the car.
But it is 11 p.m., and my car is the only one in the parking lot, the only one
with Alaska plates. Acres of Disney World parking spaces – and my car. Tucked
into the wipers, there is a note on Mickey Mouse stationery. Scott, the Disney
guy, wants to know if I am all right, could I call him so he wouldn’t worry. Would
Sophie and I accept free tickets to Blizzard Beach? Turned out he’d been
checking the lot all night to make sure we’d returned from the clinic.
“Oh,” Sophie says. “They are so nice. I had to hug them goodbye
because they were so nice.”
“Well, some people might say it’s their job….”
“10,000 Miles, 24 Water parks, 10 Stitches to the Head, and 3 Bathing Suits
Later”
© 2007 Barbara Brown
8
“I know,” she says. “But they were nicer than they had to be for their job.”
I think so, too.
Which left me with only one problem: how to get the stitches out. The
doctor told me a week or ten days, no longer or the skin would grow over them.
Oh, yuck. But after Blizzard Beach, after Texas, after rejoining with Tim, we were
on to Colorado, Water World, and his family. That would be more like two
weeks.
Tim’s sister Holly is a nurse. Or rather, was a nurse. Sort of a skeleton in
the closet that no one talks about. But this wasn’t brain surgery, it’s just snipping
stitches out, right? I wanted to show some confidence in her skills.
Our sister-in-law Linda said, “Outside. Do it outside. I don’t want any
blood in here.” We went out on the porch with the new manicure set from my
mother. There was nothing to worry about after all.
“Only time I’ve done this,” said Holly, “was on a goat.”