My adventure continued this week as my friend Trish and I took a good look at St. Augustine via a Hop-On-Hop-Off trolley. We did more sitting than hopping on or off due to a little cold front that came through. It was delightful. Actually, it was shivery delightful.
After not hopping much, we ended up at the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum and we thought, why not, it’s as good a place as any to warm up, and luckily, they gave a discount to veterans. I recall reading the Ripley cartoons in the newspaper when I was a kid, always wondering if it were to be believed or not, but let me tell you, I saw stuff I didn’t know existed. I remember my mother warning me (she never told me, she always warned me) to stop running around like a chicken without a head. Guess what! We saw one, but I don’t think it was what my mother was talking about. It was a headless chicken, all right, and I wondered how it ate, clucked, and breathed and there were no chicken lips. My mother also told me more than once I was clumsier than a six-legged cow…oh, dear, there it was, standing right next to the chicken with no head. A cow with six legs.
Next to the cow sat a wax likeness of a woman who spent much of her adult life sitting on chicken eggs to hatch them. I’m not sure if that was true or not, but anything is possible considering the week before we saw a full statue of a woman who waved to every ship coming into Savannah for forty-four years, trying to find (or lure) a boyfriend that she had apparently lost. I’m slow, but I would have gotten the hint that he didn’t want to see me after a mere forty years. Appropriately enough, she was called the waving girl.
The sequin pictures of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe were fun, but I puzzled at who would spend that much time gluing tiny sequins on a three-foot by four-foot painting canvas. I saw a torture chamber, including an iron maiden (not the rock group, however) and I’m incredibly happy that my mother knew nothing of those devices when I was a naughty child.
I drew the line at a few things, like walking through a moving graphic mirror maze that made me dizzy before I entered it. I figured that I would fall down and break something I might need later that day, like my leg. Trish made it to the end, but this Marine said no and took the cowardly way out.
The trolley ride was good, complete with plastic barrier between seats, and Ripley, was…whew…a sight to behold. My grandmother’s advice to always get on the bus was tested this week, but we got ‘er done.
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One more thing: mask up, we’re getting there!
