Most of my photos are now packed away in boxes and would be difficult to rummage through. So I decided not to use a random photo for this post. Instead, I deliberately sought the oldest pictures we had in digital format on our PC—it’s much easier to search a PC than multiple boxes.
My husband began using a digital camera before I did. I used to get my snapshots on CD as well as prints, so I might have older digital pictures than he has. But my CDs have not been transferred to our PCs, and they are now packed in the same boxes as my photo prints. Ergo, I searched my husband’s Pictures folder on his PC to see how far back it went.
He’s pretty organized, and the oldest set of pictures I found was of our Aruba trip in late 2002. The next oldest was from March 2003, when we took our daughter and a friend of hers to Corpus Christi for spring break. Spring break seemed an appropriate topic for this March post, and the pictures brought back memories of that Texas trip sixteen years ago.
Our original plan had been to go to Padre Island. But after a little research and a discussion with the friend’s mother, we decided we should not take two high-school girls to one of the biggest college-student spring break meccas in America. So we went to tamer Corpus Christi instead—still a beach town, still with plenty to do. And, we hoped, less visible drinking and ogling of young females in bikinis.
Our hotel was near the beach. In addition to beach activities, we took the girls kayaking and windsurfing. Both girls are athletic, as is my husband. I am not. When we go kayaking, I insist that he and I share a boat—I don’t want to be responsible for myself on the water. As I recall, he and I shared a kayak on this trip, and the girls shared another one. We paddled through a sheltered waterway between the mainland and an island and stopped to eat lunch on a beach.
On the windsurfing day, I declined to participate. So did my husband. But both girls wanted to learn, and so we drove them to where they could get a two-hour lesson. The lesson itself only took about an hour, then they were free to play on the boards. And so they played. They’d manage to stand for a while, then fall into the balmy water. Then up again, and down. They seemed to enjoy it.
Until my daughter stepped on a piece of glass in the water. That ended the session immediately and began a search for an urgent care facility to clean the puncture wound in the bottom of her foot. We drove for what seemed like ages, daughter bleeding in the back seat.
We found a medical facility to treat our daughter. No stitches. Just cleansing and a bandage. She limped onto the airplane home the next day, but the wound healed over time. She still has a lump in the sole of her foot, probably due to a fragment of glass or maybe to scar tissue, but she’s had worse injuries since that one.
I hate to say it, but I was glad that our daughter was the girl who was injured, and not her friend. Because we realized that we didn’t have any paperwork from the friend’s parents to treat their minor daughter. I’m sure we could have figured out how to get her emergency treatment, but it might not have been easy.
What injuries or other catastrophes have you suffered on vacations?
