Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 19, 1995 TAG: 9506260003
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
ELIZABETH THOMAS' tale has all the elements of a great vacation horror story: biting fleas, lost keys and a bear. More specifically, a big black bear on her bed.
First, the fleas: When she and her husband, Heth, walked into the cottage they borrowed at Wintergreen a few summers ago, they were greeted by a veritable flea circus leaping off the rug onto their legs. The fleas had been left by the owner's dogs.
No problem. They went to the store, bought a flea bomb and set it off. The Thomases, who are from Roanoke, stayed outside for a day while the bomb did its work.
Next, the keys: Heth went to play golf the next day. His wife drove to meet him and visit the gift shop. She locked her keys in the car, thinking he had his set. He didn't.
The brand-new Oldsmobile 98 had security locks, so they had no luck cracking it open. "Even though they had a convention of used-car dealers," Elizabeth says, "they could not get us in the car."
Her husband shattered a small back window with a hammer. Shards of glass flew over the upholstery.
Finally, the bear: Sunday morning and all was well despite the earlier excitement. They headed out on a great five-mile hike, came back and Elizabeth fried a big breakfast of bacon and eggs. She was cleaning up when she heard a noise at the other end of the house.
She thought someone - who could it be? - was at the door.
She called to her husband. He checked. No one there. Elizabeth heard something, louder now, in the master bedroom
She took a peek: It was a bear, with its front paws on the bed. Ready to climb on. "And looking right at me," she recalls.
She screamed and took off through the house. "My husband and I sorta stomped each other to see who could get out the door first," she said.
They took refuge in the Olds. Elizabeth suggested they drive to a neighbor's place for help. One problem: This time the keys weren't in the car. They were on the bedroom dresser.
The bear ambled out of the house.
Heth told his wife, "They scare real easily."
He got out, faced the beast, clapped his hands and shouted - Elizabeth swears these were his very words - "Go away, Bear. Shoo!"
The bear kept coming.
Heth got back in. The bear circled the car, even putting his paws on the window.
The bear lost interest in the Olds, and Heth saw an opening and ran to the neighbor's. Elizabeth waited, with the safety locks locked and the bear circling again.
Help came and the bear ran off into the woods. Elizabeth was a bit shaken, but local residents took it in stride. This sort of thing isn't uncommon in the pretty mountains around Wintergreen, she and her husband learned.
One couple showed them something that topped even Elizabeth and Heth's story: a snapshot of three bears they'd discovered lounging in their hot tub.
This is a recording,
a recording,
a recording ...
Jennifer Rader, 19, says her family once took an agonizing tour of Gettysburg, Pa. - a cassette tape-guided automobile tour that was supposed to last three hours but instead took three days.
Jennifer, who lives in Botetourt County, was about 11. She says the tour took three days because they had trouble coordinating where the car was with where the tape said they should be. The tape would describe, say, a barn. There would be no barn, and they'd have to double back and find it.
"So we drove for hours and hours and hours," she recalls. "It was awful. We ended up stopping at every site. My dad would read every plaque."
On another history-related vacation that same summer - this time in Colonial Williamsburg - Jennifer awoke early one morning and went into the bathroom to read a book so she wouldn't wake anyone. Then she started doing gymnastics - and broke the shower-curtain rod. Her dad made her apologize to the manager.
A very, very Brown vacation
Forgive Julie Bell if she asks about the color scheme the next time she reserves a hotel room.
Last summer she and her husband, J.R., headed for Myrtle Beach with their two boys. They had a limited budget, but they found an efficiency for $320 for a week.
It was a good deal. So they thought.
The motel, Julie Bell says, was one of those that had survived Hurricane Hugo a few years back. "But barely."
It was a brown stucco building with a brown roof and brown paneling inside. The lamps were brown. The curtains? Brown. The bedspreads? Brown. The phone? You guessed it.
Bell says there was also "brown scungee carpet with big squares missing. Just like they cut it out." She wouldn't let her kids walk on it without shoes.
"They even painted the white concrete around the pool brown," she said.
In the interest of full disclosure, she notes that the ceiling did have a bright orange beam. "That was the added touch that broke up the brown-ness."
Things didn't improve much even after they cut off the lights and consigned the brown-ness to blackness. Each night between 1:30 and 2 a.m., Bell would be awakened by "digging and scratching" noises inside the walls. The management said it was birds on the roof. She was pretty sure it was rats. She felt sure one was going to fall through the ceiling and land on her face.
"You could hear 'em running," she said. "They were just partying."
The noise never woke her husband or their kids. But she slept a few nights on the brown concrete - in a lounge chair by the pool.
Elvis never wore brown
Mike Sheets is a big Elvis fan. "Always have been," he says.
He thinks it's great he lives next door to a house in Pulaski County that looks amazingly like Graceland, and that Elvis' military I.D. number includes Sheets' birthday and current age (33). But Sheets certainly never thought his vacation pilgrimage to Graceland last fall would trigger a series of more weird - and sometimes painful - coincidences.
After visiting Elvis' home, Sheets went to a ZZ Top rock concert. Sometime during a "horrible, loud" opening band, his stomach began hurting. He thought it was the food and beer. But by 4 a.m. he was in agony. He could barely move. He spent 30 hours in a Memphis hospital, but doctors couldn't find the cause. He was still in pain throughout the 12-hour ride home and went immediately to the hospital in Radford, where doctors found the problem. They took out his appendix.
In March he taped a segment of "The Jenny Jones Show" in Chicago in which producers had him made over to look like Elvis. The show aired April 5, and the next day Sheets went to the doctor again. The doctor told him he had a hernia resulting from the appendectomy. He went in for hernia surgery on May 1 - which happens to be Elvis' wedding anniversary.
Later, he was setting up a three-month checkup and the secretary asked him: "How would Aug. 16 be?"
Sheets laughed out loud.
She asked what was so funny.
"That's the day Elvis died," Sheets said.
She asked if he'd like to make it another day.
"No," Sheets said. "Make it Aug. 16. That would be very appropriate."
Ski bummer
The airliner circled above Atlanta. And circled. And circled. It was December 1992, and Jann and Fred Swartzendruber and their three kids were on their way to go skiing in Utah, but Atlanta was socked in by a freak fog.
The plane, low on gas, landed in Asheville, N.C. After several hours' wait, the Roanoke family got a flight back to Atlanta and made it from there to Salt Lake City.
The first day they hit the slopes, they learned a helicopter carrying people making a ski-equipment commercial had just crashed, killing four.
Later in the week they were standing in the lift line when they heard shouting. A lift chair had fallen hundreds of feet into a rocky ravine. Fortunately, it was empty.
It was snowing hard when they left. They were driving their rental car to the airport along an icy but deserted road. Somehow, Fred says, they managed to skid into "the one car that we'd seen for at least half an hour."
The crash totaled both cars. Soon afterward, another motorist barely missed Fred before smashing into their disabled car. Jann stood out in the cold for so long in flimsy shoes that she suffered mild frostbite.
They barely made their flight, then were stranded for hours in Cincinnati by bad weather. They re-routed through Pittsburgh, where they endured more delays.
Jann says they felt blessed simply to make it home safe. And despite the traveling calamities - and the disquieting proximity to the accidents on the slopes - the family actually loved Utah. But they probably won't go back.
"We've just figured out that skiing around here is pretty good," Jann says. "As long as we keep our feet on the ground."
Mr. Speaker, I move that we temporarily table funding for highway weed abatement
General Assembly member Ward Armstrong, a Democrat from Henry County, knew the family trip to New York City was going to be a logistical nightmare.
The plan: His wife, Pam, who works in the hotel furniture industry, had a business meeting in Detroit to go to first, so it was Ward's job to get his mother-in-law and the kids - Whitney, 2, and Courtney, 6 - to Richmond. They would stay the night, catch the train the next morning, and change trains in Washington, D.C. Pam would fly in and meet them in Washington. Simple.
As Ward steered his mini-van up U.S. 360 toward the state capital, Whitney got sick - all over the back of the van. He stopped and opened the sliding door to clean the yucky mess from the girls' blankets and toys. What he didn't realize was that, there in the dark, one of Courtney's tennis shoes had fallen out.
They stayed the night in Richmond. In the morning he rushed to Wal-Mart in the rain to get Whitney a cheap pair of tennis shoes for the trip.
While he was packing the van, he heard the hotel door slam. Whitney screamed. She'd caught her little finger and the door had sliced three-quarters of the way through - the tip was just barely hanging on. He wrapped it in a wet washcloth and rushed her to the hospital.
A hand surgeon sewed it back on - it would soon be good as new - and the doctors assured Armstrong he could go on with the trip as long as they kept Whitney's finger bandaged and gave her something to prevent infection. The doctor wrote a prescription, Armstrong rushed to get it filled, and they barely caught the later train to D.C.
A worried Pam Armstrong, in the meantime, had called her husband's law office and heard why her family wasn't on the earlier train. They met at Union Station, boarded another train and made it to the Big Apple.
In the rush to get off the train, they forgot the cooler with Whitney's medicine. It headed on with the train to Boston. They asked Amtrak workers in New York if it could be located and returned. The train workers laughed.
They called their family doctor and had him call in a prescription to a pharmacy in New York. Naturally, it cost three times what it had in Richmond.
They had a pretty good time their two days in the big city and made it onto the train and back to the hotel in Richmond without mishap.
Of course, the next morning they left Whitney's medicine in the refrigerator at the hotel.
On the way back down U.S. 360, Armstrong remembered the place where they'd lost the shoe. He pulled over and he and his wife fanned out. He walked 50 yards one way, she walked 50 yards the other.
"Lo and behold," he says, "she found it. And here's the coup de grace: The highway department had mowed earlier in the day. The shoe was in two pieces."
Rapid eye movement
Mary and David Socky of Roanoke have had many vacation adventures. One involved getting pulled over by police in West Virginia for driving with a wingtip-shoe-clad artificial leg hanging out from their 1954 panel truck.
"All my husband has to do it mention the word vacation and my eyes start twitching uncontrollably," Mary says.
The story we'll tell involves the time they were part of a group of cavers in Puerto Rico. Their guide got blood poisoning and they had to carry him and their gear over five cruel miles of mountains before they found a hospital. Now they were stuck, Mary says, "in the middle of nowhere."
They asked about hotels and finally were directed to a place called the "Motel Pan American." It was shielded by security guards and 12-foot high walls. A big guy and a little guy came out to speak with them. Mary says the little one explained that in that area, families stayed in hotels. At motels "you pay by the hour and it's very discreet." Ohhhh.
But the group was desperate for a place, so they talked the men into letting them stay. It was clean, had hot showers and air conditioning and the management ended up appreciating their business. It made just one request: "You have to park your station wagon around the back. We don't want you to upset our regular customers."
It was Mom's idea
Last year Debbie Johnson and her husband, Bob, decided to move back to Virginia from Connecticut. With their move to Roanoke looming, Debbie decided the family needed to visit Canada before they left the North. At 8 a.m. one morning they loaded their two daughters into their minivan and headed out.
Naturally, Caitlin, being a 5-year-old, wanted to know a few things: ``Where are we going?'' ``How many miles?'' ``How much longer is it going to be?''
And: ``Why? Why are we going to Canada?''
Bob Johnson's answer: "It's your mom's idea."
The Canadian border officer asked them to declare the purpose of the visit. Debbie told him the same thing she'd told Caitlin: "'Cause we've never been there."
And where did they plan to go? In the Southern twang that stood out so well up North (``I sound 'hick-ier' when I talk to those people up there."), Johnson answered, "Just down the road a piece."
They drove perhaps three miles and realized that that part of Canada looked a lot like New England. They turned around and headed back to the U.S.A. In all, they'd spent maybe 15 minutes on foreign soil.
They arrived home at 9:30 p.m. - after more than 13 nightmarish hours on the road.
But Debbie says her oldest daughter, Lauren, 15, seemed unfazed by it all: "She just sat in the back seat and looked the side window and listened to music on her headphones."
Ode to bug spray
Her first night in Mexico, Deborah Littlefield woke to stifling heat. She flipped the light switch and her fears were confirmed - the electricity was off. She stumbled over to the glass door and flung it open, hoping for a breeze. Instead she got something else - there was no screen, and bugs swarmed in. Or as she puts it:
"Mosquitoes! Big Mosquitoes! Hungry Mosquitoes!"
Littlefield, from Roanoke, and her best friend, Jane Mantz, from Richmond, had gone to Mexico to celebrate Jane's birthday. A honeymoon couple gave them a can of insect repellent, and Deborah and Jane grabbed their pillows and blankets and slept on lounge chairs on the beach.
Then Deborah was stung by a Portuguese man-of-war. She had an allergic reaction, and the infirmary had no drugs to treat it. Jane asked what she could do, and Deborah simply said, "Make sure I keep breathing." Jane listened for every breath. She didn't sleep the rest of the vacation.
They landed gratefully at the airport in Washington, D.C. Then they found out their car battery was dead.
This one has a happy ending. We swear.
Katherine Reier of Roanoke remembers this vacation from the summer of 1961: She was 8. Her mom and dad loaded her and her three brothers and two cousins into their '55 Ford station wagon and headed for the mountains of Pennsylvania. They were pulling a rented camping trailer behind them.
On the way up a steep, winding road, the engine overheated. It was getting dark.
Then they heard a tornado warning on the radio.
"Tornadoes don't happen in the mountains of Pennsylvania," Reier says. "But there was a tornado warning that evening."
Her parents put all the kids - ages 4 to 11 - in the travel trailer.
"The mountainside was so steep that little kids would fall off one side," Reier recalls. "We cooked homemade chili and had to hold onto our bowls so they wouldn't slide off the table."
Things worked out: "The engine cooled off. The tornado did not materialize. And we made it to the camp and had a great vacation."
by CNB