camel 1, mom 0

My dad took his family to the Denver Zoo a few weekends a summer. He had it made in certain respects: Denver was far enough away to be considered a 'weekend trip', and his children were young enough to ward against any negative comments of the potential lameness of the destination.

So off we were. The trip crawled along rather uneventful, save for a few whimpers from being backhanded from the front seat. My dad could make backhanding an Olympic event, I'm sure of it. I could almost squint my eyes and see him proudly thrusting the gold medal over his blonde head. The first hint of my brother and I starting to fuss over whose side was being tainted by their sibling's hands/feet/breathing (yes, breathing), my dad would reach around and knock my block off with such precision it would make any athlete shake his head in awe.

But I digress.

We arrive at our destination relatively unscathed, a bit worse for the wear but mostly sunny spirits all the same. I still don't know whose idea it was to stay in our car to ride through the zoo, but that's what we did. At the time my tender age prevented me from seeing the sheer irony in driving that distance in a car only to see our attraction from the same tear streaked, fingerprinted, chocolate encrusted window.

After much begging and manipulation, we convinced my father to purchase us a bag of animal feed, although to any rational adult it would prove a worthless purchase ~ feed was for those families who got out to walk the trails, not those who saw the animals from their Chevrolet. However after much whining, he begrudgingly obliged and we began our trail. First stop, lions. My partly cloudy disposition started to improve somewhere around the monkey's cage. Why, this was the ticket! Riding through the zoo in our air conditioned vehicle and reaping the benefits of seeing the zoo animals was truly the best of both worlds. My father was a genius!

As we rode through the zoo path, midway through there was a camel habitat. Let me first tell you that I believe camels are the Devil's Shetland pony. They smell, they spit, and they have yellow nasty teeth that rival any 3 pack a day smoker from Manhattan. Plus, those teeth are huge. Gigantic.

We roll up to the fence and lo and behold! Oh lucky day, there is a camel right in front of us for our viewing pleasure. Now this, I thought to myself, was service! My mother in the front passenger seat rolled her window down and gave this camel a bit of our purchased zoo food. I still don't believe it was because she had any fondness for camels, I think it was more to help us prove to our patriarch our earlier feed purchase was not in vain.

In any case, my mother fed the camel until it was literally inches away from our car. Dad pulled out the ol' camera and took advantage of this aesthetically pleasing vacation moment. Imagine our surprise when this camel chose that moment to stick his entire head INTO our car. Between us kids screaming and the camel's clamor, my mother dropped the entire sack of feed into her lap. The camel, who had quite enjoyed his generous treat via our feed bag, followed his food source right to her crotch.

My mother, who had a gift for quick thinking, attempted to roll the window back up. The camel's neck being strangled by the car window, along with my mother hysterically and frantically screaming and waving it away, combined for a nasty confrontation. This was the point where my mother began to scream for my father to hit the gas and GO! This would have seemed the best course of action, if my dad hadn't been laughing so hard he was crying.

I'm telling ya, if we'd had a video camera in those days, we'd be on the fat side of $100,000 and a trip to meet Bob Saget.