Jay Thomas Vs Clark W. Griswald

I love the National Lampoon Vacation movies.  They are great.(1,3,4, European can get out.)  I am however starting to think I'm becoming Chevy Chase's lead character Clark W. Griswald.  Why?  Because I keep putting myself in potentially awkward vacations.  I like to call them Blaker vacations.

A Blaker vacation is what happens when Jay and Shanna Black decide to vacation with Dylan and Heidi Baker...take the BLA of Black and the KER of baKER and BOOM  BLAKER.  

Last year we had the first ever BLAKER Vacation or a BLAKATION to CHICAGO.  Oddly enough, where the Griswald family is from. We all loved Chicago and thought it would be fun to travel together.  The trip started simple enough, a fun 6 hour road trip to the windy city.  Our plan was to see the sights, catch a few movies and for sure have some painfully awkward moments thanks to yours truly and Heidi Baker.  Probably more her than me.

The first night we ate at a pretty nice sushi place and went to the movie INCEPTION.  Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.  First we got stuck trying to go into a parking garage..this is where things went the way of a griswald vacation. 

I used to have a van that when the hydraulics were too low it would scrape the road.  This as you could imagine can cause a lot of problems.  My new van has NEVER had this problem.  As we sat there stuck, Dylan put it in reverse and scccrrrrrraaaaaaaaapppppeeeee went the bottom of the van.  My first thought was, "Hmmm that's odd.  Hope that's not what I think it is..."  Across the street from the parking garage we found a parking lot.  Went in and as I got out of the van I turned around to see the van look like it was maybe 5 inches off the ground.  @#*(!  I thought.  I put my optimistic blinders on and went to the movie with my best friends.

After the movie was over the plan was to go back to the hotel....across town, no problem, except that the van was hopping up and down like a low rider.  The highway would have been dangerous so we decided to take the normal city streets.  It was close to midnight and "going through the city" meant going through the most dangerous section of Chicago.  This was becoming clear with every new building....liquor store...popeyes chicken....white castle....bullet holes....bars....more bullet holes.  The whole time we are driving the back seat is jumping UP AND DOWN, UP AND DOWN and the girls were laughing hysterically, I was getting nervous and I'm pretty sure Dylan was too, but he was keeping it cool for all of us.

Eventually we made it through the killing streets and safe and sound back to the hotel.  It was a nice place but a feeling of dread was kind of taking over.  The next day the van was taken to a auto shop that specialized in converted vans, our first bit of luck(ish) but was it too late??  Was our vacation over?!

Now the BLAKERS were without a vehicle.  What to do??  There was a movie theater close by...right through the parking garage.  PERFECT!  Let's go see Despicable Me!  We'll just cut through the parking garage, that'll be easy.  For a school teacher, a scientist, and a couple of DJ's...we are idiots.  I was pretty sure we were all going to be raped in that parking garage.  We had to go up a level, down a level, up three more levels, then left three levels...it was a maze.  We got through...luckily and saw a pretty fun kids movie.  Then we had to cut through the garage again....in the dark...awesome.  Again we made it just in time to cross a busy Chicago street on a Saturday night and almost get run over.  We were like a live action Frogger game.

We had no way to get home except to take a rental car.  Dylan and Heidi HAD to get back on that Monday for work or Heidi would be fired.  The rental place didn't have a handicapped accessible vehicle so that meant that Heidi and Dylan would have to leave us behind....THUS ENDING THE first ever BLAKER VACATION EARLY....

Oh and one point, Shanna cut her foot and Heidi almost(or did) crack a tooth.  Super time guys!  We can laugh about it now and Dylan did help us to get into a nice hotel after they left us. Alone. In a big city. Alone.

Shanna and I had a whole new adventure being stranded in Chicago and then in Elgin Illinois.  But that's for another blog, this is about becoming Clark Griswald.  I realize that this was only one vacation with the Bakers, why would I think this could become a tradition?  Because Thursday Shanna and I fly out to Ellicott City, Maryland for....

THE BLAKER VACATION 2: The Search for McNulty's Gold.

One of our plans- Take a tour of the locations filmed in the HBO series THE WIRE.  A series about the drug and gang scene in Baltimore, feature ACTUAL LOCATIONS.  Seriously what is wrong with us?  This has disaster written all over it.  CAN'T WAIT!