What You've All Been Waiting For. Not.

The good news is I'm finally going to fill you in on my vacation. The bad news is, a certain dog-walker has not returned her questionnaire so you won't be reading my analysis of the leaving-the-farm experiment.

Shortly before our day of departure, Kayti discovered that the weekend we'd be in Missouri was the annual Webkinz Extravaganza. (Webkinz are stuffed animals that are coded so you can register and play with them online. Kayti has about 20 of them.) The Extravaganza consists of a bunch of games and contests offered at half-hour intervals at stores that sell Webkinz.

Kayti searched online and concluded that the store she wanted to go to was in Little Rock, Ark. That's a mere six-hour drive, one-way, from where we planned to be that weekend. If I made the slightest noise suggesting I was about to question the wisdom of predicating our entire weekend on where to find the Wheel of Wow (i.e., "Kayti, don't you think ...") the girl would start gnashing her teeth, rending her garments and keening like a professional mourner.

It just wasn't worth the attempt at discussion, so I shut up and let it ride. Who's got the power here, anyway? Can Kayti drive? No. Can she whine and complain? Yes. So, the jury is still out.

The first leg of our flight was smooth and quiet. The second was extremely bumpy, plus I was sitting beside a man who stared straight ahead for almost the entire 2.5-hour flight. He was giving me the willies. Maybe he was praying, or maybe he was waiting for the bomb in his luggage to go off. At one point he raised his hand and scratched very, very slowly above one ear with one finger. I thought maybe that was how he detonated the explosive.

This was happening as we descended toward Kansas City, and soon I forgot about potential bomb blasts as the plane's wings tipped wildly from side to side and our pilot executed a bone-jarring one-point landing.

We stayed that night in a very nice extended-stay motel that I'd gotten for a song on Priceline. I wasn't sure when we arrived at midnight that it was the greatest place, because waiting with me for a clerk to open the office was a young man with a nasty gash on his forehead and blood streaming down his face.

"Whew, what happened to YOU?" I asked, all tact as usual. He didn't answer me, and he didn't answer the clerk when she exclaimed over it, either. She gave him a shrewd look and said, "Don't wanna talk about it, huh."

The next day we drove to Joplin. The first thing I noticed was that many roads are simply named for a letter. We took T over to J and crossed O, etc., etc. You get the picture.

The next four days were a mad whirl of swimming in the hotel pool, wrestling Kayti for the TV remote, not being able to watch Red Sox games (which was just as well, since they were on a losing streak), stuffing ourselves at the Great Wall Chinese buffet, and driving to and from a Hallmark Gift shop about 5 miles away that, thank heaven, was offering all the Webkinz activities for which Kayti yearned.

While K hung out at the gift shop Friday evening and all day Saturday, I amused myself by measuring how many times around the parking lot makes a mile (3), practicing pennywhistle on the sidewalk, and getting my eyebrows and lips waxed at the salon next-door to the Hallmark store.

I did steal some time away from my demanding daughter to jam with Rex's conference confederates. Friday night I played pennywhistle and a borrowed fiddle. Saturday night, I grabbed a guitar and did a couple songs. The guys were all surprised that I could play guitar, and said so. I said, "Well, I don't really play guitar, just a few chords." They all looked at each other, and, pretending to be insulted, said things like, "What's your point?" It was really funny, because basically that's all they do on guitar -- play a few chords.

Saturday night, pre-jam session, Kayti, Rex & I went out to dinner with a friend of Rex's named Jim Scott. He took us to a place called Under the Cliff, which is a restaurant built (duh) under a cliff. I actually had a beer (my annual) and some good laughs, especially while playing foosball. I felt like I was in college again.

I did worry some about the farm. Sunday morning, the first words out of my mouth were, "Rex, maybe our house burned down and no one has your cell phone number so they can't call us."

Rex said, "We left my cell phone number on the kitchen table."

"Yeah," I said. "But if the house burned down, so would your cell phone number."

Sometimes I wonder about that guy. He fails to make the simplest connections!

Once the conference was over, we wandered off to see a little of Oklahoma. We found a buffalo ranch, a coal-burning plant (I looked at the smoke and said, "Just think, we'll be breathing that in Maine in a few days") and not much else except little, nearly dead towns.

We crossed back into Missouri at the town of Noel, and few miles south of that we discovered the something-Bluff Caverns. We stopped there long enough to spend some money and for Rex to lose his camera, but not to see the cave, because it was too late in the day.

Our night in Arkansas deserves mention, if only because it was so bad. I allowed Rex to make some decisions, and we thus ended up having really bad food at a Cracker Barrel and paying way too much for a hotel whose pool was out of commission. In addition, Kayti was badgering us to find a place with a foosball table and, ideally, Jim Scott, too.

As I paid for our meal at the Cracker Barrel, the cashier said, "How was it?" I said, "Okay."

"Just okay?" she said. "What was wrong?"

I said, "Well, the biscuits were too salty."

"Is that it?" she said.

"And the soup was too thick. And it wasn't hot enough."

"Anything else?" she said.

"My husband says his barbecued-pork sandwich tasted like it was barbecued about two weeks ago."

"Is that it?" she asked.

"Oh, and the waiter didn't bring us any corn bread." I added quickly, "But don't blame the waiter. He was really cute and very polite."

Poor Rex got barely any sleep that night, thanks to his aged sandwich. I slept pretty well, but only because I forced myself not to think how much we were paying for a place with no pool.

The next day, I explored Noel, Missouri, on foot while Rex and Kayti visited the caverns, this time for a full-blown tour.

It was a gorgeous day, and as is my wont in new places, I immediately got directions for and headed to the town library. Dogs were running loose all over the place and the houses were just tiny little things. It was about a half-mile to the library, but the library was closed, so I walked back to the main street.

It now became my new mission to find a place with a bathroom. I remembered that coming into town, I'd seen an "H" sign and remarked that the hospital must be up that road. That's where I headed now.

A couple miles later, waddling along with a full bladder, I was fuming to myself, "Where is that damn hospital, anyway?"

People didn't seem terribly friendly. I stopped at one yard to admire a pack of shih tzus, and a fat woman and a fat girl appeared behind the screen door and frowned at me. They probably thought I was going to steal their stupid little yappy dogs.

Eventually, I concluded that the hospital was the figment of someone's imagination. I doubled back on a dirt road named Easy Street on the other side of the railroad tracks, where I found enough privacy to pee. Then I climbed onto the tracks and followed them back into town, passing only a couple of stinking piles of roadkill.

It was only after Rex and Kayti picked me up at the designated park bench and we'd headed out of town that I realized the "H" did not stand for hospital. It was the name of the road.

We did meet up with Jim Scott again, but we couldn't play foosball because Under the Cliff was closed on Tuesday. Instead we went to an arcade, where I racked up a lot of points playing Skeeball.

And that's pretty much the vacation, except I left out the visit to the museum and the hour of hot, steamy sex with a complete stranger I picked up in the hotel lounge.

Incidentally, I'm preparing a PowerPoint presentation about this year's visit for next year's conference in Joplin. Everyone else had a PowerPoint presentation, and I want one too! From what I could see, it didn't matter if the subject was boring.