And A Rodent Shall Carry The Plague

Dear Hagen,

As threatened, we left the house last Thursday and headed out for the closest Chuck E Cheese's, in Spokane Valley, WA. For the trip, we had rented a Chevy Traverse with bench seating. I only mention it here by name because it was the single crappiest vehicle I have ever had the displeasure of traveling in, designed by people who have never met a child.  If any of our readers might be in the market for a new family car, I want to warn them accordingly. You have to pull the second row of seats forward to climb into the back, but instead of the back of the seat coming forward like it's done in every car since the time of Henry Ford (I'm assuming), instead, the seat of the Traverse snaps into a vertical. I learned this for the first time when I had left some items on the seat and they all flew toward the windshield as if launched by catapult. The latches for car seats are on the same seats that flip up, so if you ever wanted to use the third row of seats, you'd first have to remove the second-row car seats to let someone back there. I want to write Chevy a strongly-worded letter, but I realize I'll probably come off as a crazy person if I draft a letter that begins, "I don't actually own your car, but it sucks."

We drove directly to the Chuck E Cheese's for lunch.

They have a new security policy at the franchise ("New" in the sense that they didn't have it when I was last there in the early 1980's), and each family is stamped on the hand with the same number in ultraviolet ink. When you go to escape leave the establishment, they pull out their black light and make sure that you're leaving with the same young'uns you came with.  So, if you were thinking you might swing by your local Chuck E Cheese's and shop around for a while and maybe leave with a more well-behaved young'un than your own, they no longer allow upgrades.

Laney spent a lot of time hugging a fiberglass Barney.

It was sweet, but it's not the kind of thing that wins tickets, which was what Peg Peg was there to do.
Turns out Peg Peg is great at skee ball. She and Tex kept disappearing over to that corner of the play area and coming back with piles of tickets. Peg hit the "10,000 Points" hole a few times, and ended up earning 221 tickets at the end of our time with Chuck.

Sure plays a mean skee ball.

As we were leaving, Laney got to meet the actual Mr. Cheese, but this was as close as she was willing to get:

Smart girl. There were some older kids there who kept poking and squeezing and generally assaulting the short drama major trapped inside that outfit, and I longed for him/her to exact revenge - maybe by locking them in that plastic rat tunnel and making them eat the pizza.

After lunch, we checked into our hotel room and took a moment to enjoy the near-panoramic view of the Hooters:

Peg Peg only takes us to the nicest places.

About eight hours after we left Chuck's, Tex came down with a gastrointestinal malady that sounds roughly akin to Montezuma's Revenge. He seems to think those things are related. 

After two days of agony, we took him to the walk-in clinic in Missoula last night, where he told the nurse practitioner that he'd been to Chuck E Cheese's, and she said, "Well, that's not good." She prescribed him a hearty round of antibiotics along with some other meds. 

New slogan idea:

Love,

Mom