I have a very simple recommendation for my kids to live a happy and fulfilling adult life: Never own anything. Ever.
I base this simple life changing piece of knowledge on the fact that I have recently packed up the contents of the house I have lived in for the past 14 years, and I have decided that I have approximately 150 percent too much stuff.
I’ve never been really good at change. I like stability. I like normalcy. I like routine. To give you perspective — I have eaten roughly 15,000 breakfasts in my life. Since I can remember, about 13,000 of those have been maple and brown sugar instant oatmeal.
I love a nap.
Love, love, love a nap. Just a quick recharge of the system. And I especially love napping while traveling.
As a kid, falling asleep in the car and waking up at your destination was as close to teleportation as you could get. I mean, think about it — you doze off somewhere around Atlanta and then, boom, you’re waking up in your bed.
Nothing says good times on vacation like almost losing your swim trunks in front of a few dozen strangers.
This outstanding life event occurred recently at the Big Kahuna’s water park in Destin, Fla. The park has numerous water slides and lazy rivers that are a fine time indeed. But the highlight of the park, in my humble opinion, is the Honolulu Half Pipe.
Whenever I’m traveling, I enjoy stopping at local haunts to see what they have to offer. And sometimes, I find things such as this:
This is apparently a raccoon, based on the fact that, as I was taking this picture, a guy in a truck pulled up and said, “You taking a picture of the coon? It’s about 40 years old.”
Small spaces are a little boy’s enemy.
It was a typical request from a grandfather to a grandson: “Go put the rat snake on the bird feeder.”
What? That’s not your usual Thursday evening entertainment?
It all started when I got a text message from a friend. It was a picture of a large snake on the top of a fence with the text: “Yikes! What is it?” I considered responding, “Relax — it’s a fence. They’re common.”
Here’s a little known fact I bet you didn’t know: If you walk down 1,000 feet of stairs to the bottom of a gorge, if you want to get back to the top, you will probably have to walk back up those very same steps.
I suppose the world will just have to treat me a little more special now that I can introduce myself as “Mike Gibbons, Guinness World Record Holder.”
Ladies and gentlemen, mankind has outdone itself again.
Forget space travel and organ transplants and As Seen On TV products. Those are yesterday’s news. I have experienced humanity’s latest great achievement, and it included me hitting a kid in the face with a rubber ball while bouncing on a trampoline.