No Shit

You can tell by this photo that we have our grandkids for the week. That's why I'm late today and why this will be brief. We spent the night at Daingerfield State Park. We first went to that park almost 30 years ago. We fell in love with it and we've been going ever since every time we get a chance. It's a tiny, tiny park with a three-mile hiking trail and a lake in the middle. We went equipped to do it all and we did. Note the hiking boots, picnic supplies, life jackets, swim noodles and other various plastic things that require Grandfathers to search for highly specialized equipment to blow up while the Grandmothers are quietly blowing them up the old-fashioned way with lungs that can yell across a 50 acre lake.

In short, we had all the standard vacation equipment. It brought to mind one of our family's favorite stories of the year we took a similar station wagon packed the same way to the coast and decided to take a side trip to NASA since we were in the Houston area. As we drove in with our sunburned faces, with everything in the car covered in beach sand, we stopped at the guard station. The sign said "State Your Purpose." So Beaven leaned out of the station wagon and told the guard "We're just visiting."

I started laughing. Elizabeth started laughing. Emily started laughing. We laughed so hard we couldn't talk. We laughed until our eyes teared and our mouths drooled. Beaven just looked as us. We must have been hysterical for about 20 minutes. Finally Elizabeth stopped laughing long enough to tell him, "Well, Dad, I don't think he thought we were astronauts checking in for our flight to the moon."

Today, 25 years later, we can say "Just Visiting" at any family gathering and still laugh for another ten minutes.

If we are paying attention, life give us many of these "No Shit" moments. I'll leave you with another one from this morning. Read the sign on the paddle boat we rented this morning for about 5 and a half minutes: "Fast pedaling can cause rapid tiring of legs."

Have a very fun No Shit Summer. Find something to laugh over for 20 minutes. Make a family memory.