First Person: Going Bananas

Editor's note: In this second installment, Tim Edsell recounts the swimming team parent's quest for something to do with a bus full of restless kids when the meet schedule is upended hundreds of miles from home.

Swimmers take your mark…BLEEP!

Day Two of the Banana Swim Meet started as scheduled at 9 a.m.

Of course I’d been up since 7 Saturday morning, the alarm clock thankfully marking the end to a long and restless night sleeping on the floor in room 204 of Valdez High School.  This wasn’t my first time on the merry-go-round. I had packed an air mattress to cushion the unforgiving cement.  But the result was still aching muscles, sore joints and a headache from tossing and turning all night.

Swim meets are not the most exciting spectator sports.  Put another way, watching a swim meet is like standing in an hour long line at the fair for some cheesy attraction your son is begging to ride.  We finally get up the front of the line. He races for a seat.

Thirty seconds later, it's all over.

And so the day went until about one o’clock; to my surprise the meet was over for the day.  I had expected it to last until dinner time.

So there we were, early afternoon at Valdez High School with two dozen kids and the next event on the schedule wasn't until Sunday morning at 8 a.m.

Have you ever been to Valdez in the winter?  Me neither, until now.

It was closed.

I mean the whole town.  Safeway was open.  So was The Prospector.  But that was it.

We took the kids down to the harbor hoping they might burn off some energy running around the docks, but that was just a band-aid for the real problem.  They had hours of idle time and nothing constructive to do.

The kids spent the rest of the afternoon/evening playing hide-and-seek in the hallways and classrooms at the high school, watching movies on laptop computers or playing games on their portable game devices.

By 10 p.m. we (the chaperones) finally put an end to the shenanigans and put the kids to bed for the evening.

I turned back to my air mattress, now deflated (sigh) for another restless night's sleep.

Editors Note:This is a First Person account of Day Two of the Valdez Banana Meet. If you Missed Day One Click Here.