Chapter 14: I Have Just Met You, And I Love You.
You’re not going to believe this, either, but we didn’t have peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch.
We had ham & cheese. Benefits of having a fridge in the room. We hung out for a little while, eating and watching football, and then left for the Big Oak Lodge building. At 2:00 p.m., they were holding a meet-and-greet for Shadow, the mascot/watchdog of Disney’s Hilton Head Island Resort. Who can resist a cute dog?
We found shadow on the porch just outside the lobby doors, in the care of his Cast Member guardian, B’lou Crabbe*.
*Possibly not his real name.
Shadow has been around several years, and who knows how long in dog years, so he/she(?) was mostly content to sit and rest on the porch while the kids took turns saying hi. The real main event here was B’lou. He greeted everyone, joked with the kids, and played folk songs (or Disney tunes) on his mandolin.
For a while, he had a fun little Name That Tune game going, where he would play Disney songs of yesteryear for us. I had a hard time with it—they sounded so different on the mandolin, and he had a habit of hiding the melody while making all of the harmonies sound the same. Eventually, it would become clear. He had a great time playing Kiss The Girl from the Little Mermaid, refusing to quit until the men present had followed directions and kissed their wives.
B’lou also played “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” from Song of the South, and even had a tip on where to find a bootleg VHS copy of the movie in Savannah.
He also wanted to know if anyone played the guitar, and offered to teach a little mandolin. This was a perfect opportunity for David. Dave has taken guitar lessons for a couple of years and isn’t a bad player, especially for a 7th-grader. We tried to gently coax him to take Mr. Crabbe up on the opportunity.
Unfortunately, Dave is painfully shy, and doesn’t like to be the center of attention. B’lou brought out his very best negotiating techniques, trying all sorts of different approaches to convince David that it would be fun, no one would jeer him if he messed up, or look at him funny, and the mandolin would not suddenly grow claws and attack him. We even got so far as to get him in the chair, holding the mandolin. But he didn’t play a note. He just wouldn’t do it. So, we chained him to the chair without any supper.
Ok, not really. We let him off the hook. No sense in torturing the poor kid. I do wish he’d taken the opportunity, though. It felt like an opportunity missed.
Well, at least somebody had fun.
Moving into the lodge, we quickly fell into some highly intellectual, evenly matched battles of wits.
And yet another nice touch from the CM’s here.
We wandered the grounds a bit more and found a putting green, which meant the boys were suddenly occupied for hours and the girls suddenly felt a sudden urge to do…well, anything.
Drew didn’t sit still for this photo because he wanted to go back to playing golf.
We stopped back into the room and checked on the Eagles game. I don’t know if you know anything about football, but the Philadelphia Eagles had the absolute worst wide receivers in the game this past season. A couple of years ago, they drafted a wide receiver, Nelson Agholor, in the first round. A wide receiver’s primary job is to catch footballs. Nelson cannot catch a football. Here’s some actual game footage of Mr. Agholor in action:
I tuned into the game long enough to watch Mr. Agholor wipe out a long touchdown pass due to a penalty—he couldn’t line up properly. All he had to do was stand in the right place at the line of scrimmage, and he couldn’t do that. I’m not making this up. That was enough for me to know that my time would be better spent elsewhere.
So, we went out for dinner. We ended up at
The Smokehouse, a local barbecue restaurant. Once again, the Rope Drop strategy worked like gangbusters and we were seated right away. We basically went with our standards: beef brisket and pulled pork. I had the brisket, and it was fine. Nothing hugely special. Julie had the pork and liked it better.
By that time, it was dark. We hustled back to the resort to get to the main pool area in time for the campfire sing-a-long that evening. There’s a firepit down by the pier where the CM’s set a fire and lead kids in goofy summer camp songs. They encourage lots of movements and audience participation. As you can see, my kids hated it and begged to leave.
Meanwhile, I took the camera and roamed a bit. Here’s the gift shop, posted for reference so you know where you’ll be taking out a second mortgage once your kids start begging for souvenirs.
The deck outside the gift shop provided a nice vantage point to watch everyone at the sing-a-long below.
This was a song about sharks, so everyone here is making a shark fin. That song was a particular favorite.
All in all, a very relaxing, enjoyable do-nothing day at the resort.
Coming Up Next: Another day of nothing. If I keep this up, you might wish I would get back to talking about Nebraska.