The following passage was posted to an E-mail for a radio host of a local morning news show. She got a kick out of it and I thought I would share it. It basically describes a scenario in which how your expectations of something just dont match the outcome. I think you will get the idea. It was tweaked a bit to fit in this more informal format but its about 90 percent the same as was written.......
My wife and I honeymooned last August in South Dakota and Yellowstone. Now, everyone who is at least 6 years old knows that Old Faithful is the main attraction at Yellowstone. So on our first full day there we plan a trip through some of the park that would culminate with a visit to that section in the mid-afternoon. We get to the location and there are about 900,000 cars and twice as many people. And there are hotels and motels and cabins and cafeterias and gift shops and slideshows and tour groups and dolphin shows and rollercoasters and a Walmart and Tom Jones and so on all at this location. It states in a few areas how often to expect an eruption and when the next "approximate" time it is to occur. It turns out we missed it (Maxwell Smart voice) by that much. We were hungry so we figured we could snack and wait it out a bit. Fortunately there was a small grocery store inside one of the visitor's centers that provided a largely nutritious meal of chocolate chip cookies and Diet Coke. They didn't have Twinkies, whaddya want?
Now there are benches encircling Old Faithful because if you didn't sit down to wait, your legs would petrify and they would have to add that to the attractions list. And we brought our camera and video camera just as the natives did centuries ago. So after we consumed our artery-testing meal we waited.......and waited.......and waited....... Suddenly there was some burbling and then it stopped. Five minutes later more burbling and then nothing. Five minutes later, again. And again. It was like turning on one of those water faucets in a public park; only, there is no water pressure because the other 3000 are also being used at the same time. So this goes on for maybe 30 minutes. And then.....it happens. Old Faithful finally erupts. And for about 2 minutes and 18 seconds we are treated to its dance of liquid and froth and bits of inner earth. And then it slowly dissipates and disappears into the bowels of Wyoming. My wife and I kind of looked at each other and we had this look on our faces that was reminiscent of when your mom finally had to tell you there was no Santa Claus. Somehow we felt just a bit cheated because I thought the water would actually reach up to dispel clouds and terminate satellite transmission.
I mean, they say it shoots upwards of 150-200 feet into the air. Now that may sound pretty tall to someone from say, Kansas. But to us city and suburban folk who can see that kind of height in some of our houses and basketball players, it really isn't all that great. It was a really marvelous sight but it just didnt give us that goose-pimply, euphoric, awe-struck, humbling kind of feeling it might have if we were 8 or 9 years old.
I think our perspective gets a little discombobulated when we see something like that on TV or in pictures. Everything seemed so much taller, wider, longer, deeper, and a whole other bunch of "ers" when we still made homemade Arbor Day cards for mom in school and still put our old teeth under pillows ( always cold side up ). Perhaps we waited to long to appreciate it? So it made we wonder.......
Anyone else have a similar story to share?
