Recipe for Grumpy

Did you ever read that book, “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day“?

Well, insert “Garrett and Katie” for “Alexander” and you had us a few days ago. No, we didn’t have a case of the Mondays. We had the case of the stupids. What else in God’s name would have encouraged us to sign up for an all day tour in the mountains around Huaraz, Peru?

I’ll tell you what we were thinking. It was all perfectly logical. We thought we’d take it easy to get used to the altitude and see some sights. That’s not completely crazy, right? Where crazy stepped in, was when we thought that “tour” in Peru, met something different that “tour” in America.

Turns out… “tour” means “tour” everywhere. If you’re looking for other synonyms, “tour” could also be exchanged without fear for “painful excursion with strangers who annoy you”, “a waste time and money that you can never get back”, “an easy way to see your life flash before your eyes”… or for those looking for a direct translation, I’ll keep it simple: Tour = Hell.

The day did not start out well. We arrived on time to our travel office where we’d booked the tickets. A driver came shortly thereafter to take us to our bus. He looked like every scary, “don’t meet me in a dark alley” bad guy you’ve ever seen on TV. We got into his car and tried to make small talk. He was having none of it. I think he may have grunted once, but there was no other indication that he was not in fact a cyborg sent from the future to kidnap and kill us.

He dumped us unceremoniously at the bus terminal, where we stood by the back of his car not knowing what bus to get on. He stood a few feet away, purposefully not making eye contact, surrounded by a pack of fellow hoodlums and picking his nose with his thumb. His nostrils were that big. Seriously.

After about 30 minutes, someone jumped out of a bus that was out on the street and motioned for us (the ONLY gringos around) to hurry up and get on; as if it were just so obvious that we should have known that our bus would stop for a microsecond on the street rather than picking us up in the bus terminal. I did not take this as a good sign.

The bus was packed with weekend vacationers from Lima. This, in and of itself, wasn’t too bad. An opportunity to practice our Spanish, right? The next not-so-good sign was that there were no seats together on the bus, so G and I split up, each sitting with a middle-aged women. We soon realized that these women were vacationing together (cousins I believe), but they didn’t want to swap seats. They wanted to sit with us. And they wanted to take pictures of us. It felt a little zoo-like actually (Look at the Gringos. They’re so tall/blond. Let’s take pictures of them.) Um, ok. Two pictures ladies. That’s all you get.

By this time, the bus was underway. Now, many, many, MANY people will be able to vouch for the fact that my sense of direction is pathetic at best, terrifying at worst (not just everyone can get lost while leaving a Safeway parking lot). That being said, even I realized that we were not headed towards the mountains. Rather, we were circling the city. I’m not sure if the driver was looking for something, or hoping to pick up a few extra passengers (not sure where they were going to sit though), or if he had some type of odd OCD where he had to return to the bus station before leaving, but return we did. In fact, we returned to the bus station three times. THREE! No one got on or off. We just sat there for a few minutes. Checking out the local scenery I guess. Someone did try to buy some sunglasses from a tout on the third round through, but just as money was being exchanged through a window, the driver decided that he was finally ready to get underway. Sunglasses were left in the dirt.

By this time, I was thoroughly un-amused.

Normally, I feel like I can Pollyanna just about anything. Usually, my sunny disposition gets me through even the most uncomfortable of circumstances. Not today. Pollyanna must have missed the bus and gone home to pout. We were 20 minutes into the “tour” and I’d had it. As in, I almost had them stop the bus so we could get out. I just had a feeling that the rest of the trip was going downhill from there, which was going to mean that we were going to end up in the dark and dreary Valley of I-Hate-This. My grumpiness had begun, and try as I might to turn my frown upside-down, the grumpiness did not leave for 10 hours (TEN!!!) when we finally were released from the armored embrace of the bus for the last time.

Garrett tried to console me. He tried to joke that this was one of those funny things that happens while traveling that make a good story later. I tried to believe him and went along with it for a few minutes. Then the guy in front of my reclined into my forehead. Then the kid a few seats ahead puked. Then the pan flute music (The Beatles Greatest Hits on pan flute) started blaring over the crackling stereo system.

Nope. That was it. Grumpiness had returned.  It was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, and that was all there was to it. No use in trying to fight it. Sometimes, you just have to go with the flow; even if the flow is a terrible, stinky, putrid river of crap. Rather than trying to find the “good” in my day of hell (ahem, tour) I was going to relish in this day of grumpiness. (I mean, I don’t get them that often, so at least I could “be in the moment” and live the grumpy to the fullest, right?) To stay busy (and to work on my powers of observation) I started counting the ingredients for my recipe for grumpy. Turns out, the list got pretty long.

Katie’s Recipe For Grumpy

• 32 parts fellow tour-goers. 30 seats in the bus.
• 1 part vomiting child
• 4 stops at “sight-seeing” places that are not really sights to see, where you are harassed by individuals planted their for the express purpose of getting you to buy the crappy trinkets they are trying to sell

• 1 part grumpy child (preferably one who throws tantrum and lags so far behind rest of the group that you are forced to wait even longer for the bus to leave the previously mentioned “sight-seeing” places)

• 2 parts idiotic parents who buy musical instruments for grumpy child, who of course now proceeds to “play” their instrument on the bus, while walking at one of the “sight-seeing” places, and during lunch.

• 1 lunch stop where you are forced to eat at the restaurant of the Tour Operator’s desire. Most effective if over-priced, with an unappetizing menu in a less-than-attractive environment.
• Limited musical soundtrack on bus (preferably all Incan pan flute music, all the time) played loudly through speakers with lots of reverb and static. Favorite grumpy-making songs include “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, “Unchained Melody” and anything from the Titanic soundtrack.
• At your final destination (the one you actually wanted to see) there should be rain, lots of rain, lots of freezing cold, horizontally piercing rain.

In addition to this Recipe for Grumpy, while on the bus I was in fact able to confirm that Tour means “tour” in every country. I was able to document and list the archetypes of all great (aka horrible) tours. Here’s what I found:

• The Journey – Every tour needs a journey – an impossibly far off location that always take twice as long to reach as expected. While undertaking the journey, tour-goers must partake in various rights of passage including, The Windy Road, The Lack of Bathrooms, and the aforementioned Vomiting Child.
• The Guide – He/she will start out impossibly perky and truly caring that each and every person is enjoying themselves. Slowly, he/she will get more and more fatigued and cranky as day goes on. By the end of the trip, you may see your guide drinking heavily and passing the bottle back and forth with the bus driver.
• The Eaters – They will purchase food of any kind at every possible location along the tour. Ice cream and fried things are favorites. Thy seem to have the proverbial “hollow leg” that your mother used to reference when you were a teenager. They will leave their trash on the floor and/or “discreetly” throw it out the window.

• The Videographer – These are the historians of The Tour. God knows what they’re seeing out the window, but even if it’s just a fence, they are video taping it. Usually, they’ll use lots of zoom. True “videographers” will have their camcorders on for at least 80% of the trip, especially the parts where you’re driving in the bus.

• The Lovers – Any time that no one is talking directly to them, they will be engaged in some type of PG-13 foreplay. They will gift fellow passengers with the delight of letting other see their tonsils before they go in for the Big Kiss. The Lovers bring a sense of passion and youthful energy to the bus. They also serve as the archetypical reminder that youth is fleeting.
• The Sleepers – They’ll use every moment of tour bus comfort to enjoy an open-mouthed, drooling nap.
• The Shoppers – They will purchase something(s) at every single stop on the tour, regardless of how tacky, ugly, useless or overpriced it is. They metaphorically represent how on the journey through life, one can pick up much “baggage”, warning the observant tour-goer to be picky in their purchases and stingy in their bargaining.

• The Family – See ingredients above.
• The Grumpy Extranjeros – They will be cold and silent for most of the trip, laughing to each other at inappropriate times, rolling their eyes at record-breaking intervals and sighing heavily with exasperation throughout the entirety of the trip. They will react with haughty alarm when yet another fellow passenger asks to take a picture with them. In the “One of these Things is Not Like the Others” song from Sesame Street, these guys stick out like sore thumb. Surprisingly however, the other tour-goers will continue to pretend to thoroughly enjoy the trip in spite of the grey cloud of reality brought by the Extranjeros. The Grumps will give all of their countrymen and women a bad name for being “unfriendly”.

Othe archetypes include, The Little Old Lady (who asks the guide to repeat everything), the Group Photo Takers, and The Clown (who makes penis jokes while the group is watching a pottery demonstration).

And while I was able to improve my ability to catalog the walking and talking metaphors that make up our daily lives, the grumpiness remained. I’m quite satisfied to report that all in all, it still turned out to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. In the words of Alexander, “My mom says some days are like that.”

Indeed, Alexander. Indeed.

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Note 1: This post may make it sound like I don’t like children. That is not the case. I do like children… just not the two who happened to be on our Tour d’ Hell. Did I mention that they both sad DIRECTLY behind us the entire time we were on the bus. They’re weren’t seats for them, so they sat on Dad’s lap and hung themselves over the backs of our seats. So, we had lots of time to get to know them.

 

Note 2: Though in no way does it make up for the majority of our terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, we did have one bright spot. About 30 minutes after we’d left the lakes lakes that were to be our final destination (the place where the crazy torrential rains started), the sun popped out for a few minutes. We were able to spot the two tallest mountains in Peru, which was actually pretty cool.

For the record, 5 minutes of “pretty cool” doesn’t make up for 9 hours and 55 minutes of “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad”– ness. But it did make me excited to get back up into the mountains.

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