Radio Silence...

I don't know about you guys but I've grown weary of the non-stop doom and gloom bombarding us all 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

Nothing any of us can do about it anyway.

So I figured it might be a nice change of pace to talk about something else for a change.

As most of you know I recently sold the camper we've have in the family for the last 20 plus years and in the process of cleaning it out I was reminded of so many (fond and not so good) memories hauling that heavy-ass thing (6,500 lbs, empty) out to Colorado provided us.

One thing it's reminded me of is that no matter what time goes on and with the passage of that time things and some situations that seemed devastating at the time eventually pass and become something you can actually look back and laugh about.

I'll call this story "Radio Silence."

"Yeah, we'll be leaving about 7:00 Sunday morning so meet us at the rest area this side of Wakeeney, we should be there by 11:00 or so," I told my brother.

That was the conversation I had with my brother on Saturday night who was living in Dodge City at the time and wanted to come along on this trip with his 2-year-old son (now a full grown bad ass stationed in Afghanistan), Little Aaron.

We arrived at the rest area pretty much on schedule and guess who wasn't there. Yep, my brother.

No problem, and since Linda always packed enough supplies to fix lunches for an army we decided it was a good time to fix lunch.

We finished up lunch and we waited. And we waited. And we waited some more.

We finally gave up and headed into town to fuel up at the truck stop and try calling (had to use pay phones way back then) my brother's wife to see if she had heard from him. She told me he had left early that morning and should have been there hours ago.

Not sure what to do, we decided we didn't have any choice but to keep on going. Maybe he'd catch up and maybe he wouldn't.

Just about the time we were heading out I saw his car parked in the parking lot. I got out of the truck and he got out of his car and we both asked each other the same question. "Where in the hell have you been?"

I patiently explained we'd just spent the last 3 or 4 hours waiting at the rest area we'd agreed on. "Oh, he said, I thought you meant the truck stop."

I then went on to explain as gently as I could that he was a dumbass.

On the road again.

At that point it was obvious we weren't going to reach Lone Duck Campground by our agreed upon time so I called them from Colby and explained our situation and told them we'd see them sometime Monday morning.

Oh well, we were back on the road and westward bound. Life was good, right?

Not so much.

I'm not sure exactly where we were when I realized it but somewhere around Goodland I noticed my brother wasn't behind us anymore. There's another rest area a few miles west of Goodland and just a few miles from the Colorado border. We pulled in there to wait for him to catch up.

After setting there for 30 minutes or so we finally gave up and figured something must have happened so we turned around and headed back the way we'd just come trying to find my wayward brother.

And since Luke (my oldest son) had hopped in with him at Colby Linda was about to lose her mind.

We were about 15 miles east of Goodland when we saw his car sitting by the side of the road. Turned around and pulled up behind his car only to find no one in it.

By now Linda's about to come completely unglued.

We sat there for maybe 30 minutes when a trooper pulled up behind us and wanted to know what we were doing.

I explained that this was my brother's car and we were looking for him. Turned out he'd taken them to a parts store in town to find a fan belt. The trooper said he was sorry but he wasn't able to bring them back out to his car and that we could probably find him at the truck stop just off the interstate in Goodland.

Good grief.

We headed into town, found our people, went back out to his car and got it going.

On the road again.

We did manage to make to another rest area in Burlington, Colorado later that night where we fixed another picnic style dinner and got a few hours of sleep in the camper.

We finally made to to the campground the next morning and the rest of the vacation went off without a hitch.

Fast forward to the very next year and we had another little vehicle mishap.

This time it was my truck. We were about 3 or 4 miles this side of, you guessed it, this side of Goodland when the water pump went to shit.

Luckily we had 5 or 6 gallons of bottled water so we were able to limp our way to the truck stop in town. I went in and told them my sad water pump story. They had a list of 4 mechanics who might be available on a Sunday. I called the first three and got no answer. The fourth and final guy answered and said he could help me if I could get it to his shop. I asked him if he had a ball park figure on what it might cost to get us back on the road. I knew I was in trouble when he answered my question with a question of his own, "How much you got?"

$375.00 later we were back on the road again.

It wasn't hard to figure out the common denominator in all this.

Friggin Goodland, Kansas.

I hate that place.

In the years that followed, and still before cell phones were readily available we bought a bunch of walkie talkies so we could all keep in touch in case of problems of if someone had to pee or just any number of way to annoy each other.

And from that point forward we all agreed that in order to sneak past Goodland  radio silence 5 miles east and 5 miles west of town was mandatory.

That was all years ago but even to this day you can mention "radio silence" to anyone in my family and they'll all know exactly what you're talking about.

Ah, nothing quite like the family vacation...

Kevin McGinty