“So long, hot, tired, stupid car!” I declared. “No more of you for a while,” I also announced, but I was clearly mistaken as you will soon see. We are finally there! My family and I had gotten out of the car after a long car ride to a new place in France. My two older brothers Andrew (12) and Matthew (15) were fighting about something again. I don’t know what though. They argue about everything. They do it so much that after a while you just learn how to block it out. I have gotten so used to them going at each other it sounds as normal as a bug buzzing in your ear when you’re at the park. Well any way do you know that feeling you get when you have been in a car awhile and you think you’re 1 foot tall? Well that is exactly how I felt, like a little dwarf waddling on the ground. So I just stood their stretching listening to those two bugs buzzing in my ear. While stretching I saw the bell hop had finally bustled over to get our luggage out of the trunk to bring to our room.
By the time he had gotten everything out including I think five trunks and two hanging bags (my mom sort of over packed) my brother and I had already started to explore. We had stepped onto a short stone driveway with little yellow pebbles on it and plant life surrounding the edges. The driveway looked like the sand on the beach. Next to the driveway was a glittering pond surrounded with tall green grass, big smooth gray rocks, and small shrubs along with a few baby trees. The pond had a small gurgling waterfall and a little green row boat bobbing up and down on the water with two wooden paddles that the paint was chipping off of. The boat was tied to a small metal peg driven in to the soft muddy ground close to one of the green shrubs with pinkish flowers sprouting from it.
The boat looked intriguing and there was just enough room for both me and my brother to sit comfortably in it. We took an exciting little ride in the boat but it quickly became boring, because my older brother Matthew wouldn’t let us go down the waterfall even though it was tiny, and the only thing that would happen is we might get a little wet. But Matthew insisted and said that we would flip and mom would go ballistic, if we went down the waterfall.
So we got out and went inside the hotel. It reminded me of a picture in a book that I used to read when I was younger about a magic pasta pot. It was stucco with soft orange color with windows that had no glass. Its roof was made of shingles that where brick colored clay that was rounded like it was a pipe that was cut in half. They were laid at an angle over lapping each other put together with cement. The hotel looked like a lot of square boxes put together. With green plants and flowers surrounding it and vines growing up the walls, the vegetation was so thick it looked like a wall around protecting the building. Like in almost all French hotels we had been in so far. It had a little metal stand with brochures on tourist attractions next to the reception desk. My brother slowly made his way over to take a peek at some of them.
That’s when it all started. That one little brochure about go-carting started it all. It all went downhill from there.
“Dad, Dad please can we go please, please? It’s not too far away, it will be a lot of fun please Dad,” pleaded Andrew. He sounded like a mouse begging a cat not to eat it. My dad got so annoyed he gave in so he didn’t have to hear my brother complain.
You guessed it Andrew got his way and there we were stuck in that stupid smelly car again. Off to some crazy go-carting place in the middle of nowhere. “We got lost only a few times,” my brother claimed.
“Yah right,” I said exasperated. “More like 1,000,000 times.”
I guess I over exaggerated a bit, but so what, I was cold and hungry. We finally get there, and what did I say: it looked like a rundown shack and I guess what you could call a dirt race track with tiers to mark the side of the track. I think it looked like a forgotten air force base that someone had driven a weed whacker over with all that dust. We went down to the “hut” and it looked like they hadn’t had customers in five years! The owner was playing some type of badminton with who I think was his son. The go-carts where all homemade and looked like they were held together by duct tape and twine. The only worker there showed us to our carts and told us the red button on the dash board would cut the gas line to the tank and turn the car off completely.
Then he handed us our helmets all the stuffing was coming out of mine but I didn’t care. I could do whatever I wanted and get away with it. I guess I got a manic gleam in my eyes because he gave me car with a restrainer on it so it wouldn’t go as fast. Couldn’t blame the guy, I mean I highly doubt that this place had insurance and I don’t think he wanted to pay for my injuries. I, on the other hand, did not want to deal with Italian health care. As my older brother once said on a second grade project you don’t want to get hurt in Italy because they have really bad health care. After we heard the rules…
The Rules:
1. Don’t kill yourself
2. Don’t kill anyone else
…we were ready to go! I put on my helmet and put the visor down (it looked cooler that way.) I hopped in to my rundown cart and pressed the button. My brothers and I were off up the turns and bends and hills of such.
Now I know I said it was going to be boring, and now I kind of regret it. Because if you are the youngest sibling, and you were complaining about something and it turns out you like it, you can’t give your sibling the satisfaction of being right because they were probably spending the last twenty-five minutes trying to convince you that it would be fun, and they were right all along. But I was saved!
Now as I have said before I am not the most cautious of people and I was getting use to the track so I was going a lot faster, or at least as fast as I could go. There was a hair pin turn coming up next that I hadn’t remembered about and it was getting closer and closer and closer, and of course I was looking the other way and then it was way too close to slow down. I was driving full speed towards the barrier, and right behind the make shift barrier a steep incline going straight into the woods I started screaming “Ahhhhhhhh!” I panicked, and stuck my skinny legs out I was this close ( ) to tipping over or taking my leg off with the cart. Suddenly something finally clicked into place I jabbed my finger to hit the red button the car shut off, thankfully it worked. My dad, brothers and worker rushed over to see if I was hurt. My dad was white as a sheet of paper. He started in on a stream of words I had no clue what he was saying. He was obviously freaked out. That was the only other time when my dad was really scared about me getting hurt.
The other time I was 7 or 8 and I got stuck in an Olympic snowboarding trick park when I was skiing with my family, but that is another story. Though what surprised me most is that the man let me keep driving after what happened. It also gave me a readymade excuse for not liking the trip at all what so ever. I am glad my mom wasn’t there or she would have fainted and I probably wouldn’t be able to ride a go-cart ever again. I still don’t think she knows about what happened.
But as the years go by and a lot more accidents happen to me that include my foot getting stuck under the door or taking three layers of skin off with a hot glue gun etc.….. What happened that day has gotten foggy in my mind. Though I know I will never forget that day nor will my brothers and especially not my dad. I still wonder why new thoughts haven’t pushed that one to the back of my mind. My guess is it’s determined to teach me a lesson, and it does not think it has made a big enough impression yet.
