Thoughts before reading:
I don't generally like the super specials very much, but now that there's only two left I already feel nostalgic for them. Hopefully this one will be one of the better ones. It sounds like it could be fun.
The basics:
Dawn was supposed to spend the whole summer in Stoneybrook, but her dad has a buddy who needs him to drive his RV out to California for him, and he wants Dawn and Jeff to come along so they can see the country. When Watson hears about this, he cancels the family vacation so they can do the same, and he tells Kristy she can invite all her friends (of course...). Sam and Charlie are camping instead, so they won't be on the trip. Everyone gets to pick one thing they really want to see, and then depending on where their thing is, they split everyone between the two RVs. One will take a northern route, the other a southern one.
The southern group: Watson, Elizabeth, Andrew, Karen, Mallory, Abby, Jessi, and David Michael.
The northern group: Kristy, Mr. Schafer, Dawn, Jeff, Claudia, Stacey, and Mary Anne.
Jessi's group stops in Oakley and visits her grandparents. Mal acts really uncomfortable at their house, and Jessi starts to worry that there's a racist side to Mal that she's never seen before. It turns out she's just nervous about making a good impression.
Stacey and Ethan (she met him in NYC in #99) have been keeping in touch through letters. He's touring west coast galleries with his parents for the summer, and Stacey's meeting up with him in Seattle as her thing.
The northern group stops in Ohio so Kristy can visit the Cleveland Indians stadium, and they end up staying to watch a game too. Stacey hates baseball, so she spends the time reading a Cleveland travel guide, where she learns about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and museum.
Mallory's pick is Chincoteague Island, to see the wild ponies. She's disappointed about how touristy it is, not at all like the books described it. Then her and Jessi realize the book was written back in 1947... so that's to be expected. While on the island, they get into a fender bender, then end up driving around looking for ponies with no luck until they stop for a picnic lunch. A group of horses then appears among the dunes nearby, reducing Mal to happy tears.
Claudia mistakes one of Stacey's notebooks for hers, leading Stacey to get mad at her for snooping when she sees her looking at it. (Stacey won't let her explain at all, either, which seemed OOC to me.) The girls end up not speaking.
In Chicago, Claudia gets to see the Art Institute, which she loves.
Abby's pick is Memphis, because she apparently loves Elvis? They visit Graceland, but she's crushed to be missing the upcoming Elvis week by a few days. Her and the kids see an Elvis look-alike driving a pink Cadillac, and think he's the real deal. They end up following him around, until they see him meet up with a bunch of other impersonators and realize the (obvious) truth.
Kristy's seeing as many ballparks as she can, and Mary Anne wants to visit her grandma in Iowa. It's a bit out of the way, so they meet up with her at the Mall of America. Mr. Schafer makes a crack about Richard being a red meat guy, and grandma puts him in his place.
Jessi's pick is Dalton, Mississippi, where some relatives of hers were slaves. (A weird and depressing vacation choice, if you ask me...) She visits the plantation museum there, and is sickened by the images of slavery. While looking around, she meets an African-American woman who also had relatives that worked at the plantation as slaves, and now she's writing a doctorate on the Mississippi slave trade.
Once they reach South Dakota, the northern group all wants to do different things. Everyone ends up agreeing to go to the mammoth site, in the Badlands. On the way, the RV runs out of gas. Mr. Schafer hitches a ride and leaves the kids alone in the RV, in the middle of the Badlands, where they are terrified, especially as it starts to get dark. Thankfully Mr. S returns with the gas and some police help, and the group continues on to Yellowstone. Jeff's disappointed that they don't have rock climbing, but thrilled when he encounters a bear. (Mr. S later takes him to the Grand Tetons to climb instead. None of the girls join.)
The southern group makes a stop in Lester, Oklahoma. Watson's college roommate from Baylor U lives there, and they haven't seen each other in ten years. While with his family, the Romneys, there's a tornado warning issued. The family doesn't have a cellar, so everyone shelters in the bathroom together until the danger passes. From there, they head to Texas and see a rodeo... where they spend the whole time outside eating and playing games after hearing about the brutal sounding calf-roping event.
In New Mexico, the southern group visits Zuni (remember Pens Across America?). The kids gets to see the school they helped fundraise to rebuild, and "the children of Stoneybrook CT" are even mentioned on a thank you plaque out front. The principal gives them a tour, and David Michael gets to meet his pen pal.
At a gas station in Idaho, Dawn's complaining about brochures being a waste of trees when she sees one for "Buzzard Gulch: Idaho's Turn-of-the-Century Haunted Village". She's thrilled, but it turns out to be more like a theme park than a ghost town. (Sounds like what happened to me when I went to Calico, CA.) In spite of the let-down, she still has fun.
Running behind after the Zuni detour, Watson asks Karen if they can skip 4 corners, her pick. (Which is pretty crummy of him, since everyone else got to do their one thing, and she's just a little kid...) When he sees how sad she is, they agree to still go. Everyone enjoys it, and they also get to see Monument Valley.
The northerners reach Seattle, where Stacey almost misses Ethan because she can't find where she wrote the meeting place down. After a comedy of errors, they reunite and spend the day together, including a kiss at the space needle. (Stacey and Claudia then make up finally, because she wants to talk about Ethan. A pretty lame reason.)
Abby dreads seeing the Grand Canyon because her dad loved it, and they had been planning a trip there when he died. She decides to face it head on, and ends up finding some peace there.
In San Francisco, everyone in the northern group goes to see a ball game together, and they also see Kristy's dad on the stadium screen. Kristy goes over to say hello to him. He's with a girlfriend, so she keeps it brief, and makes sure to be the one to walk away this time.
The southern group goes to San Diego, to Balboa Park and the zoo. Andrew gets to see the pandas, which was his special thing.
Everyone reunites in Palo City.
Timeline:
Summer vacation, August.
Misc. thoughts:
*Back to elaborate, contrived super special set ups. Also, why can't Watson come up with his own family vacation ideas? He already piggybacked off someone else's trip in SS #1.
*Things Claudia learns from living in close quarters with her group: Kristy washes her hair with soap instead of shampoo, and Jeff likes peanut butter and tuna sandwiches.
*Mary Anne and Mr. Schafer keep butting heads in here about Richard. She's super defensive about him, but it's really immature of Mr. S to make comments about his job (or anything else, really) in front of the kids.
*I'd love to take a trip like this, and these kids are bickering, complaining and whining the whole time, just like every other vacation book. It went right over my head as a kid how entitled the kids in the BSC-verse are.
*Abby really thinks Elvis could still be alive.
*Dawn lectures people about food 24/7 now, which she never used to do. In the early books she actually was pretty easy going, but unfortunately that has really changed.
*I didn't know before reading this book that the Mall of America has an amusement park named Camp Snoopy in it. Sounds like Knott's Berry Farm, which was one of my favorite places as a kid.
*The chapter about slavery got darker than you'd expect, describing pictures of slavery in detail, and even a lynching.
*The Mississippi plantation section also made me think of the American Girl books I loved when I was at my BSC reading age. The girl who was a slave at first, Addie, was my favorite one, and as a kid I was traumatized by the descriptions of slavery that I'm sure were actually really tame.
*When Dawn thinks of NYC she thinks of excitement? Since when? Last I knew, she was terrified of it.
*Mary Anne wants to visit the Laura Ingalls Wilder home! For once I'm on her side. If I was on this trip, that would definitely have been my one thing.
*Mal thinks Jessi's experience at Dalton would make a great children's book.
*This book kept using this "?-" punctuation, which I don't recall from any of the other books.
*In even more ungrateful fashion, Stacey and Claudia fight most of the trip instead of enjoying it together, and Mary Anne sulks about Mr. S teasing her almost the whole trip. She never tells him how she's feeling until they reach San Francisco.
*The Zuni scenes were really sweet, and it was nice to see that continuity.
*It's weird to me that Dawn's never been to a ghost town and doesn't know where to find any. She's from California, where we probably have more ghost towns than anywhere else.
*A lot of Zunis have diabetes? I wonder why...
*This book has a kissing picture! That's definitely a BSC first...
*Claudia bought a sketch in South Dakota that turns out to be a real Georgia O'Keefe. Of course it does.
*Patrick sends Kristy a postcard when she gets home.
*Zero babysitting in here! I think that's a definite series first.
*Ghostwritten by Peter Lerangis
Books mentioned:
*Little House on the Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder
*Time and Again, by Jack Finney
My rating:
4 stars. I'm a sucker for a road trip story.
No comments:
Post a Comment