Or rather, "Oktoberfest in Big Bear." My family's gone for years, and loves it, and this year I was determined to do a little chicken dancing myself. I texted a couple friends, purchased some tickets online, and I was ready to go.
Until...the Scouts cancelled the camping trip. Biking was still on, but no camping, and as an extra bonus, the event now started at 5:30 a.m. with a two-hour drive to the mountains.
Now, I think of myself as a good mom, and I spend lots of time chauffeuring Mark to social activities, but come on, Mama needs a little sleep. So I made an executive decision--Mark could still mountain bike, but we'd go up the mountain as planned, the day before. And Oktoberfest was still on, although we'd now have an extra chicken dancer in tow.
Mark loved the mountain biking. Well, he loved the second half of it, anyway. The first half, the Scouts turned onto a fire trail and got lost. The road was steep and windy, and at every turn, they encountered another uphill climb. Eventually, they found their way back to the ski slopes, but Mark said it was grueling.
Back to the ski resort, the trip literally went downhill. The slopes became dusty biking trails. The boys jumped on the chair lifts, their bikes went on the seats behind them, and they spent the afternoon racing downhill. Mark loved that part.
By the time Michelle, Nicky and I picked him up, Mark was exhausted.
"Can I go back to the house and rest?" he pleaded, but I shook my head no. I reminded Mark it was Oktoberfest time. He whinged and whined, and I may have (innocently, inadvertently) used the phrases "Suck it up" and "Deal with it" but hey, it was all in the name of cultural enrichment.
Oktoberfest was a blast. We found some seats and promptly made some new friends. Mark sat down, sighed, and rested his head on the table. I sighed, too, for a completely different reason--I could tell I was in for some serious 13-year-old pouting. (I felt a little guilty about it the next day, when I learned the boys biked 25 miles, earning Mark a legitimate excuse to be tired.)
Michelle, Nicky and I weren't tired, though. We ended up at the bar, where we bought a round of enormous beers. We followed it up with this snack:
We cheered, laughed, and danced along with the Polka Dots, a band from Germany. They were great fun, although it's hard to take grown men seriously when they're dressed in lederhosen and knee-high socks.
We bought commemorative beer steins and cheered again. We had dinner, which was just okay, and apple strudel for dessert, which was awesome. We danced some more--the Electric Slide, a conga line, and even the Cha Cha dance ("Slide to the left..."), which all seemed a little out of place, but still fun. We also did the Chicken Dance, swinging ourselves all over the place. I love that best of all, because it reminds me of my little German grandmother, who always came to life when that song played. I imagined her imitating a dancing chicken and laughed.
Nicky and our new friend Kat entered the beer stein holding contest. Neither won, but they weren't the first ones out, so I say they did pretty well. I consoled Nicky by reminding her the steins were full of water, which she didn't want to drink anyway. We handed her back her own stein, not nearly as heavy, but filled with beer and declared her the winner for our table.
Mark didn't seem to have as much fun as we did. He eventually made his way to the "kinder garten" outside, but refused to ride the mechanical bull or the kid's rides. He did enjoy the ring toss game, though, repeatedly extracting money from my wallet with the excuse that it all went to charity. The goal was to toss the rings onto a small pole in the middle of the table to win $10. The game had the additional challenge of throwing around Carl, an elderly volunteer who seemed intent on collecting rings from the table, then standing directly in front of us. He blocked the table, so we had to shoot around him, which made the game virtually impossible to win but funny.
No one won the 10 bucks while we were there, but they won lots of smaller prizes. If your ring landed on any coins on the table, you'd win additional rings. Mark and I kept doing that, until we had probably a hundred rings in front of us.
Mark loaded the rings on his fingers, then made a skipping motion across them.
"I'm making it rain!" he laughed, but I immediately shut that down. I still had some modicum of propriety left.
Eventually, we ran out of rings, even with Carl slipping us extras. We never won big, but it kept us busy and happy for half an hour, so we didn't walk away total losers.
Eventually, we realized we'd reached the adults-only portion of the evening (no kids were allowed in after 6). We were happy, full of German beer, food and music, but Mark was exhausted. We decided to call it a night before any more hard-drinking adults arrived.
I left with a smile, as the last few notes of a German polka faded behind me. My friends were happy, I was happy, and although the kid wasn't thrilled, he'd spent a great day exploring the local mountains. It was a pretty fun weekend, in my book, at least.
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