Juvenile Stork, or, The One Decent Image I Got This Weekend
A friend of mine has categories for different kinds of fun: Type 1 fun is fun when you're doing it, and fun when you look back on it fondly. Type 2 fun is not so much fun when you're doing it, but improves significantly in the re-telling. Type 3 seems fun while you're doing it, but doesn't stand up well to the memory test. Type 4 fun isn't fun when you're doing it, and isn't fun a year later.
We had lots of Type 4 fun this weekend.
You all know I can write with relish about Type 2 fun, which, when on a trip, I have renamed "Good Bad Travel." It's undeniably a bad trip, but it's either interesting or adventurous, and so therefore is the good kind of bad travel. When my brother got pickpocketed by two Italian teenagers on the Gran Via in Madrid, it ended up being Good Bad Travel, because the ensuing story was hilarious: We went to the police station in the Puerto del Sol and reported the theft in our best Spanish. The desk cop listened to about three words of it before rolling his eyes and speaking to us in English, as if he were addressing two toddlers.
But in order to save a trip from a Bad Bad Travel designation, there must be some aspect of 1) humor, 2) danger or adventure or 3) some other interesting feature. There was none of that this weekend. When you pick the coldest weekend in a decade to visit Florida, when you are wilderness freaks who get stuck in a KOA campground on the weekend of the Daytona 500, when you go to a wildlife refuge known for its avian life and see approximately three very hardy birds*, then you are experiencing Bad Bad Travel.
*This may be a slight exaggeration.
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