Coffeehouse Chronicles …Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?
- Marc & Bridget Saunders
- Aug 26
- 4 min read
Well, hello there, Chroniclers!
Busy weekend! On Saturday, the HB and her Junior spent most of the day making gumbo, and quite a bit of it, might I add. And before you ask, nope. It’s all gone. They made it for the high school carnival, where the clubs have booths and sell something, usually a tasty food item, to unsuspecting tourists to raise funds for their particular club.
Last year, the HB Jr’s first year at this school, they made gumbo. It was a big hit. They clamored for the HB’s gumbo. Sadly, when they make it for the carnival, I never get any. Personally, I don’t think it’s fair. All of these strangers lined up in front of their booth get to savor the deliciousness, and me, well, I just get to smell the sweet aroma as it wafts from the kitchen occasionally if there is a favorable wind.
I was curious as to how they would do trying to sell hot gumbo on the hottest day of the year. It sold out again. People love the HB’s gumbo.
While they were hawking their wares at the high school, I was on a mission of my own. I was driving out to celebrate the eighth birthday of the youngest coffeehouse associate. He submitted the proper documentation through channels for the day off and was granted ONE vacation day to tend to his affairs. He spent the day soaking himself and splashing his little buddies in the pool with friends.
These kids today are so spoiled. I can remember back in the day when all we had was a garden hose and some heavy-duty trash bags to concoct our homemade slip-n-slide! I can also remember my grandma instructing my cousins and me to hang the bags to dry, fold them, and put them under the kitchen sink when we were done.
Imagine us letting perfectly good trash bags go to waste.
On my way to getting soaked by seven shrieking, giggling eight-year-olds, I got a phone call from one of my pilot buddies. “Yo. Whatchu doin’?”
I told him about the excitement that I was about to have, but mt pilot pal appeared totally nonplussed and said, “Yeah, okay, whatever. You feel like flying to Vegas for some dinner?”
My mind started to spin… what did he say? “...and then fly back?”
“Yup. You know I’m kind of a big shot now. I have my own plane, and this is what we pilots do. You ready?”
Dammit. Why does he always call me at the last minute like this? If you’ve been paying attention, I believe we covered how much I like to fly in a previous Chronicle. If you can’t recall, I like it A LOT. But, I looked at my watch, it was almost four PM, and by my calculations — a drive out to see the littlest grand (and by littlest, I mean youngest, because at 8 years old, Bam can almost look eye-to-eye with his cousin who’s a senior in college), party it up with him for a respectable amount of time, head back to Chino to arrive at the airport right at about 7:45.
I reached back into the backseat for my copy of the Farmer’s Almanac to see what time sunset would be. Just kidding, I estimated like every other normal human, and came up with, “Hey, Bro, won’t it be getting dark soon?”
Again, I like to fly, but I’ve never been in anything the size of a VW Bug, in the sky where I was pretty sure there were no street lamps. Well, I have been in a Sheriff’s helicopter a couple of times, but we were over an urban area, and I could see the streets, and that’s a totally different story for another Chronicles. Remind me later.
Back to my story about dinner in Vegas on this particular night. If memory serves me, there is quite a bit of desert between the Inland Empire and Sin City. In every trip that I’ve taken through the desert, I couldn't recall any street lamps. The one thing I do remember vividly is climbing two or three steep grades that challenge the long-haul truckers to go any faster than 40-45 MPH. So in my little pea-brain, I was trying to reconcile how we would know where the mountains were and how to avoid them if we couldn’t see them.
But then I thought, “It’s flying though. You know ya wanna.”
And off I went. I met my pilot pal at the airport at 7:47, prepped the airplane, and took off into the night. I even got a picture of that famous thermometer in Baker. I couldn’t tell you what the temperature read on it, because it was 8500 feet below me, but I got a picture of it.
It was a pretty flight out to Vegas. We were both looking earnestly out the window for other airplanes, any stray mountains, and checking the radar to make sure that nothing popped into our flight path. At night, it’s dark as heck. You can’t see where the ground ends and the sky begins.
On the trip back, we were both more confident, and we actually had a conversation.
It was a long day, though. I finally hit the driveway of the coffeehouse at two AM.
—
What would the Chronicles be without a mention of Cmdr McCroc? The Big Bad Wolf mistook his river house for a crib belonging to one of the three little pigs. Right as my pilot pal and I landed in Henderson, my phone started to blow up with photos of the damage that a microburst that focused on his house had caused.
Luckily, no one was injured, but the house lost some of its roof and ½ of the wall on the back of the house, revealing studs and the back bedroom. On the upside: free AC, the negative: the AC only blows hot, and it’s 118 F.
“Who’s on the phone?”
“It’s Jake. From State Farm.”
You know what to do. Drink ‘em if you got ‘em
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