For my 40th birthday, we were supposed to be in Europe. We got our passports renewed. I’d looked up where we were going to stay, the prices, things to do. For Christ’s Sakes, travel books were purchased. I was ready.

Then…

Woodpeckers. What do woodpeckers have to do with your trip? You might ask. Well, woodpeckers bore holes into you house, leaving large round openings and it’s illegal to kill woodpeckers in Ohio. So until we figured out that it was the carpenter bee larvae that they were digging for and treated for that, they kept drilling holes into our house. Honestly, it might be time to treat for the bees again because I’m pretty sure I heard knocking the other morning. The side of our house looks like Swiss cheese on one side and that, of course, is the side that faces the street.

Again, what does this have to do with your trip to Europe?

Well, in order to repair the damage and repaint the house, this blows my Europe budget out the window. And not just out the window, like across the street and in the neighbor’s yard out the window. Europe is so far out of reach, I was looking on if there was a return policy for the $250 I spent to get our passports renewed. There’s not, by the way. Fucking, stupid woodpeckers. Also, adulting sucks!

So, instead of real Europe, Ross and I took a much more cost effective trip to fake Europe. That’s right, as many of you know we went to Las Vegas.

We visited “Italy”…

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We visited “Paris”, kinda…

And we visited “London”, actually we just rode an even bigger London Eye. We’ve now been on both but here’s the conversation that followed:

Ross: How many people do you think have been on both the London Eye and this thing?

Me: Probably alot. More importantly, how many people do you think have been on all of them?

Ross: Are there more?

Me: Probably. They probably have one in Singapore or some place like that.

Ross: Why Singapore?

Me: Cause Singapore is like that. They all kinds of shit.

Guess what the Google machine told me today…Hello Singapore Flyer

Anyway, we had a good time and I don’t miss the tourist death march of WWI battle fields that Ross would have taken me on through Belgium. There are only so many grassy fields that you can look at before you go bonkers.