Cheap Unexpected Entertainment

The girls and I took a little drive today so I could do some drive-thru banking. On the way back home the Mouse fell asleep so I kept on truckin'. I ended up at a Philly-style soft pretzel store nearby, just as the little girl awoke. The pretzel shop sits at the end of a strip mall and to it's left, where a movie theater once stood, is a pile of dirt...currently a construction site. How perfect for a Mouse infatuated with trucks! We sat in the car eating our pretzels and watching from the front row as the big scooper truck collected dirt and deposited it into dump truck after dump truck. We had to be there for at least 20 minutes and the Mouse loved every second of it.

It reminds me, in an odd way, of my trip to Chicago last month with my Dad. Other than the ballgame, I made no plans. We decided on a whim to visit Soldier Field early on Saturday morning and discovered a high school football game about to kickoff. We got to experience the legendary venue from the inside and saw Donovan McNabb's (our hometown QB) famous high school play ball on a gorgeous August morning. A totally random situation that had we planned a visit probably wouldn't have occurred.

I tend to prefer both traveling and living this way...plan-less. I do often enjoy the skeletal outline of a plan when heading into a day home with the girls, a weekend or a vacation but generally speaking I love to wing it. There are seriously annoying downsides to this manner of being, of course. Like in Paris during our first trip there 5 years ago, when it was just The Mrs. and I. We walked for hours trying to decide where to dine one evening. I was so unsure of my choice that I wish I had researched a place and booked it in advance. The wife still brings up that evening every now and again when a plan-less plan of mine goes down the crapper. While that Paris dinner experience could be blamed more on indecision than a lack of a plan (after all it's not like we couldn't find a place to eat and went hungry that night, I just couldn't pick a Parisian cafe for one of our 3 dinners in the city of lights. I wanted perfection and was paralyzed by the fear of anything less).

Many folks can't handle a day without a detailed map of the whats/whens/wheres let alone an entire vacation but sometimes the best plans are the ones not made and the best entertainment is that which occurs all around us everyday...especially for a little Mouse.