I’m proud to say I have something in common with one of the greatest college football coaches in the land: Bob Stoops and I both should have prevailed in our attempts to postpone the family trip to the Happiest Place on Earth.
Let me explain.
My day job in sports marketing has afforded me some interesting experiences, like attending four Super Bowls, three Pro Bowls, the Masters and an NBA Finals game among others. Yet, it was a certain famous football coach from Norman, Okla., who gave me advice that still haunts me like a bad plate of enchiladas.
“Rudy, you need to win that battle,” Stoops said, meaning that I should convince my wife to save our maiden voyage to Walt Disney World for a time when my then 5-year-old daughter could more fully appreciate the experience. “All my daughter remembers is the hotel swimming pool,” he explained.
So, I asked him if he tried to talk his wife out of it. “Are you kidding me?” he said, laughing, as we arrived at his TV commercial shoot.
Stoops led the Oklahoma Sooners to 109 victories. He’s a defensive guru, a master motivator and would win by a landslide should he enter the governor’s race in Oklahoma. But his endorsement of canceling our trip to Florida fell on deaf ears. My wife’s planning was already in an Excel spreadsheet — that was that. We were going.
Fast forward five years later: We’re now talking about a trip to the opposite coast and Legoland with our 5-year-old son and now 10-year-old little girl. I ask my daughter a simple question: “What do you remember from Disney, honey?” Her answer: “The hotel pool was cool.” Great, I think to myself … $3,000 in airfare, resort hotel accommodations, a rental car, food and gifts, and the hotel pool is her dearest memory.
Maybe, instead of our California excursion, we can take a trip to Chuck E. Cheese’s and then splash around in our neighborhood’s new, fancy pool (awesome slides, baby!). We can just skip Legoland for the time being … right, dear?
Yeah, right. Excel spreadsheets had already been filled out in triplicate. Legoland was on like Donkey Kong and I couldn’t stop it with Stoops’ defensive front seven.
So how did the big trip to Carlsbad, Calif., go? Great. Without showing you the slideshow (the editors refused my plea to download my 1,424 photos to the magazine’s Web site), here are the highlights:
- You haven’t lived until you’ve experienced a 75-foot Albert Einstein face made out of Legos. When you see what these Lego engineers can do, it makes you wonder what all the fuss is about with healthcare reform.
- In-N-Out Burger. This was more of a Dad treat than the family unit’s decision. But if I’m in Southern California, I can smell a double-double animal style from the terminal at LAX. If In-N-Out ever moves to my neighborhood, I might need a personal cardiologist.
- Kids and hotels. I really think if we just checked into any hotel in the Dallas-Fort Worth area with the kids for a couple of nights, they would be as thrilled with that as they would be if we stayed a week in Hawaii. What’s better than hauling butt down the hallways playing tag, investigating each stairwell like the cast of CSI-Miami and predicting which elevator door will open first?
- Then there’s the hotel pool. That deserves its own bullet point. It’s one of those unexplained phenomenons like the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and Sarah Palin. Hotel pools are the key to survival on the family trip. A good hotel pool, especially one with an adjoining hot tub, can save a trip scarred with delayed flights, lost luggage and terrible buffets.
Legoland will go down as a success. No one got sick. We didn’t have to take out a second mortgage. And I got my In-N-Out-cheeseburger fix. And just in case the kids forget about everything (except the hotel pool, of course), we’ve got an hourlong slideshow ready to go at a moment’s notice. While I couldn’t agree more with Stoops’ advice, there’s nothing like spending time as a family — no matter the destination.
