Door County Reprise: Ahhh, girlfriends

This time I got to go to Door County with just girlfriends, and no children whatsoever. It was, in many ways, similar to Door County: It's All About the Kids: there were fights, spills, much staying up late, and lots of eating. On the other hand, did I mention that there were no children? Here's what it looked like:

Friday, 3 p.m. Cocktails.

Friday 5 p.m. We walk to town to return a bottle of expensive wine that turned out to be nasty upon opening. Bob walks like a cyborg. She's unstoppable, and I jog to keep up.

Bucky stays home and checks email and surfs the internet.

Friday 6:30 pm. Yours truly breaks wine glass and spills red wine on irreplaceable antique cushion. Bucky lets out sigh of relief that it wasn't her. Everyone else just goes "tsk, tsk" and pours salt on the stains. (Note: The stains came out. Apparently, pouring salt on the stains, letting it sit overnight, rubbing them with a bit of Oxy-Clean, and soaking the fabric in more Oxy-Clean is the right method for red wine stain removal. Phew.)

Friday 7 p.m. Dinner at the Log Den, with the trying-too-hard-to-be-funny-waiter-Gerald. Bob sends her steak back because it's overdone; Gerald tells us that the chef threw it against the wall in frustration. Another steak arrives, mooing. Bob eats it anyway. Except the parts that are still wriggling.

Friday 9 p.m. - 11 p.m. Try to find something fun on cable. Settle for lame news shows instead. Bob makes ridiculous remarks about Democrats. I make ridiculous remarks about Republicans. Everyone kisses and makes up.

Bucky checks email and surfs the internet.

We talk about The Shack, which J-Cool is currently reading, Bob loves, and I can't figure out why it's on the NYT bestseller list. (See my updated review here.)

Friday 11 p.m. - Saturday 2:30 a.m. Puzzle-building. Photo on box too small for Queen to see, but she's a puzzle-building machine anyway. Bucky checks email and surfs the internet. Spike goes to bed early and yells at Bucky in her sleep. This really happened. What does it mean?

Saturday a.m. Bucky and I sleep in until 10 or 11. Meanwhile, everyone else gets up and serves breakfast at Door County homeless shelter, runs a marathon, and writes six chapters on first novel.

Saturday noon: Bob and The Vespinator walk to Bob's favorite hang-out, the grocery store. Queen, Spike, J-Cool, Bucky and I go antiquing (sp?). We stop at every sagging red barn and every carved bear to take pictures, which drives Queen crazy and makes Vespinator wonder what it is that everyone loves about carved bears.

Saturday, 3ish: Everyone except Bob drives to Fish Head, or Egg Crick, or whatever the quaint, touristy Door County town is called, to shop for Scrabble; later we find out there is a whole closet filled with games, including, of course, Scrabble.

Instead of Scrabble, we find Pictionary and Trivial Pursuit (Genus) at a resale shop, which looks more like a fire sale crammed into a linen closet. We also buy two puzzles for Lindenhurst, or whatever Doc's house is called. They name their houses up there. I think I'm going to name my house. How does "Crazyland Meadows" sound?

I figure out that I like the idea of shopping for antiques, but I don't really like antiques, because it mostly looks like a bunch of crappy old stuff. So who's the one who spends money at the antique stores? Me. I buy red marbles for my marbles-and-dice-filled candy jar and two really old books that will look cool on my shelves in The Green Room.

Saturday, 5 or 6 ish: Cocktails. Doc's adorable mom Nano comes over for a glass or five of wine. We're all kind of subdued around her, until we figure out that she's the bomb. Then we all let our hair down and cut loose. Nano tells us, halfway joking, that we're kind of mean to one another, because we tease and crack jokes non-stop. Later, Bucky takes this to heart and points out that maybe we (read: E. Peevie) need to be nicer to one another.

Bucky checks email and surf the internet.

Bob cooks a fine piece of meat and some fine roasted potatoes, and we all go into a food coma for awhile. Oh, and we drink about 12 bottles of wine.

Saturday, later that evening: We don't play Scrabble after all. We build the lighthouse puzzle and Bob educates the rest of us on how to teach our kids to handle their own money. (Details in a future post.) J-Cool and I decide to change our parenting accordingly, and the rest of the girls decide to have children just so they can try out Bob's techniques. Except for the part where the teenager gets more disposable income in monthly allowance than most of us see in a year.

Bucky checks email and surfs the internet.

Sunday a.m. Bucky and I sleep in until 10ish. Everyone else gets up at the crack of dawn and justifies their existence. Vespinator makes breakfast with leftover potatoes from the night before, plus some other stuff. She's like the MacGiver of breakfast.

We all do some cleaning up, put our dollars in the pot for the cleaning lady, and give each other good-bye chest bumps.

Sunday 11:15ish Everyone leaves. On the way home, I wonder if if the exit I'm headed toward is going north, and should I take it, and J-Cool says "Yes," so I take it, and Vespinator says, "By which we mean 'NO!'

But it's too late, I already took it, and we end up getting gas and visiting the most frightening and disgusting indoor toilet north of the Mason-Dixon and east of the Mississippi. We all hope that the germs were mostly not airborne, because otherwise? We're doomed.

J-Cool notices that the Wisconsin gas station has attracted the most multi-cultural crowd she's been around since her around-the-world honeymoon: Mexicans, Peruvians, Koreans, African-Americans, Pakistanis, a couple of Russian mobsters, and the four of us--all of European descent. The rest of us wonder how she is able to discern the origins of the Peruvians, and she explains--but we remain ignorant and flummoxed.

The trip is done now, and we're all back to real life. But ahhh, girlfriends. It's so great to hang out with them. I am one lucky Peevie.