My nephew Eugene Titweller is what some people call a computer geek. He’s the kind of kid that we used to beat up and put headfirst into a trash can back in the day when things made sense. Now, being a nerd is cool and I am more enlightened about feelings these days. The most I ever do to Eugene is thump him on the ear, because he’s family.
So, as we were rolling down the turnpike and blowing through SunPass lanes with mud on my license plate, we started talking about how to get tickets for Disney World and a place to us to stay.
That is classy and fancy.
I wanted to stay at the Rodeway Inn on 192. They had a gas station right on the parking lot of the hotel according to some feller in a chat room. I thought that was cool man. If you want Mt. Dew and a Slim Jim at 2 a.m., there ya go – that is the definition of convenience and class.
But Eugene said he found a deal where we can get free tickets and a condo for just $199 bucks for the whole stay. Since we were spending Eugene’s tax refund, I thought that sounded OK. He said all we gotta do is sit in on some sort of meeting where they show us around the place for a couple of hours and they try to sell us a timeshare. Sounded like a plan to me.
So, we find these condos, and let me tell you something, this place was fancy man! All these pretty little houses all jammed together, palm trees just a swayin’, and a real nice pool that I thought would be great to try my new floating beer cooler contraption.
Eugene goes into the office and comes back out and says, “Here is our tickets and our room keys, but they want us to make an appointment for the sales presentation.”
“Let’s see,” I said, “we are leaving on Thursday morning…book it for Thursday afternoon.”
Eugene started whining about that he had to put his credit card number down and he was afraid they would charge him for us skipping out on the tour. I told him to relax, that I had a plan. I didn’t tell him that the plan was that they would probably charge his card, but I hate sitting through those timeshare sales presentations because I can’t say no.
High pressure sales presentations are how I ended up with an expensive vacuum cleaner, a magazine subscription to Vogue, and my fourth wife. Hell, I always get upsold from medium to large at Sonic and with an order of fried mozzarella sticks to boot.
So we get settled into the condo, and the discussion came up about who gets the big, king sized bedroom. I had to flip Lute and Eugene for the big room. I flipped them pretty good too, because both of them are little guys and I had one month of Tie-Kwon-Doe classes I won at a church raffle. I Kung-Foo’d them until they agreed that I really did need the big bedroom.
After we unpacked our luggage, and by luggage I mean the plastic bags from Dollar General Store. Then we headed out to the pool.
The pool was OK, but there was some foreign sounding guy wearing a banana hammock that made him look like he was smuggling plums. He had gold chains and enough hair on his back to weave a Navaho blanket.
He said his name was Dieter from Darmstatd, and he said either he was there to neuter a goat or that the was there with his wife and kids. His accent was pretty thick.
Dieter was friendly enough, and was impressed with the floating NASCAR cooler I brought with us. After a few dozen Natty Lights, we had him singing Freebird with us and doing belly flops off the edge of the pool. Later on we took Dieter out to a Waffle House and let Eugene buy us all a round of quarter cheeseburger plates with scattered, smothered and covered hashbrowns. He even yacked in the parking lot like one of us. This magical place brought together someone from the other side of the world and normal American people like us.
Next time, I’ll talk about going to the Magic Kingdom and how Lute Fenwick found out drinking a half-gallon of chocolate milk and eating a half-dozen Krispy Cremes, then riding that tea cup ride goes together like Too Live Crew and the Pentecostal Church.
