Whoot Watch: The Debacle

The other day my wife says to me “Sweetie, Wednesday’s are $10 dollar wristbands on the boardwalk in Ocean City and I’d like to take Jonny and Jordan”. I responded, “That sounds like a terrific idea sweetie”. Unfortunately it turns out this was the only Wednesday in the entire year that the pier does the ten dollar wristbands so as you can imagine it was a bit packed with people.

Actually, to say that it was a bit packed is a bit of an understatement, it was more like one was trapped in a single level ant colony with amusement park rides, fried food stands, and baby strollers as far as the eye could see. Getting into this hive of humanity was the first trick, the wife took Jordan and I led Jonny by the hand. After 1 minute of trying to penetrate the moving wall of people I whisked my nephew off his tiny feet and went for the push now be polite later approach. The good news was that approach worked well and I was now in the center of the mess, the bad news was that approach worked well and I was now in the center of the mess.

After more pushing and around 20 minutes the wife and I reunited and attempted to go on a ride with the kids. Ocean city must have little precious experience in dealing with crowds of people because there were no snaking lines and no way to know where lines began or ended. Suffice to say we stood in “line” for five minutes or so to go on the children’s version of the tilt-a-whirl before realizing the line was in a completely different spot.

After a 25 minute line and a two minute ride we departed the attraction and I overheard the operator tell a young mother, “it’s going to rain in around five minutes, but we aren’t going to close or stop the rides, the rain will pass in around 25 minutes”. I laughed to myself as I heard this because there was not a cloud in the sky. Besides, meteorologists cannot predict the weather with as much accuracy as this clairvoyant forecasted.

Unbelievably four minutes fifty-nine seconds later, the sky opened up and it began to pour. Buckets of water were falling from the sky and we were getting soaked. The kids were in t-shirts and shorts and immediately began to get cold. I turned to the wife with “whelp that’s it I guess, no more crushing crowd of people time to go home” on the tip of my tongue, but before I could get it out she said, “there are umbrellas in the car, we parked between 10th and 11th streets”. I tossed her the child I was watching at the time and walked away, somewhat disgusted and 100% soaked.

The rain was pounding my face as I passed the ride operator and I shot him the evil eye as I walked by, he was smiling and extremely proud of his uncanny prediction. I hoofed it over to 10th and 11th and found no car. Perplexed by my unfamiliar surroundings (I’m a Wildwood guy) I decided to call the wife, but she decided not to answer, it’s possible that having two kids in the torrential rain kept her from answering the phone. I then calculated the possible locations we could have left the car and multiplied by the possibility that it was stolen and divided by the likelihood it was towed.

I determined I was simply given bad intelligence from the wife and that I needed to go about a concentric grid search starting with the blocks nearest the boardwalk and expanding my way out until I found the car. Unfortunately I kept deviating from the grid search and walked back and forth over the same stretch of road until my feet started to prune from the water that now well above the level of my flip flops. After around 20 minutes of searching (and the wife undoubtedly cursing my name) I went back to the grid search plan and found the car on 9th and 10th. I grabbed the umbrellas and high tailed it back to the pier.

I located my wife at the helicopter ride around 24 ½ minutes after leaving placed the umbrella above the kids and her heads and it immediately stopped raining. The weather channel really needs to find this guy. Disgusted by the lack of encouraging results from my trip to the car I did the only thing I could to make myself feel better. I left the wife with the kids and went out of the still crushing crowd (not a soul left when the rain hit) to the boardwalk proper to buy some French fries (should French be capitalized when it comes in front of “fries”).

When I realized that I would have to share the fries with the rest of the gang when I returned I bought a pretzel to eat on the way back to the family. I quickly made my way back to the group while eating a pretzel, carrying a bucket of fries, and holding multiple ketchup cups and it almost proved to be more complicated than I could handle. Anyway because of the delicate balancing act I was forced to eat the pretzel at inhuman speeds and consume at least half the bucket of large fries so the ketchup would not fall out. I was not feeling that great as I got back to the family and Kim informed me that Jonny wanted me to take him on the big boy tilt-a-whirl.

Usually I am pretty good on rides but my stomach was a tad unhappy with me at this point. We were sitting in the center of the car when Jonny yelled to me that the ride wasn’t spinning fast enough. I’m no physicist but I figured that if we slid to one side it might speed up a bit. Sadly I was correct in this estimate and the ride became 300% more intense. I threw up a little in my mouth… but I was able to at least swallow it again without spewing.

Anyway after that, the time we had with the wristbands was over and we were “forced” to go home. When we got to the car Jonny was doing the pee pee dance and I tried to get him to pee on the wall of a house that was for sale. Kim thought that was inappropriate so we settle on him peeing in a bottle inside the car. Turns out that a 4 ½ year old cannot accurately pee in a bottle and he peed all over the floor. Thankfully we had to borrow his moms car to transport the kids and all their gear to the boardwalk!