The morning started out as anticipated and we started out just before 10:00, to catch our 2:40 p.m. flight to Jackson, Wyoming. Our plane is scheduled to land just before 9:00 and then we’ll take a shuttle to the motel where I’ve made reservations. Once there, we’ll spend the rest of the evening and then have breakfast the next morning, before we’re picked up by the bus I’d chartered to take us to Yellowstone National Park.
Unfortunately, the trip to get to our destination was not short or easy. When planning this excursion, I had to make some tough choices, beginning with selecting an appropriate flight. There was no direct connection from Pittsburgh to Jackson, Wyoming, so my first decision was which flight to take. We had a choice. We could go from Pittsburgh, to Atlanta, to Salt Lake City and then to Jackson, which would end up being a 10 – 13 hour trip, depending on layovers. If we didn’t like that option, we could fly from Pittsburgh, to Cincinnati, to Salt Lake City and then to Jackson, and this would shorten the trip to somewhere between 8 to 9 hours.
The problem was if I chose the latter flight, which I did, we wouldn’t fly out until after 2:00 in the afternoon and then arrive at our destination a little after 8:00 p.m. The other flight left earlier, between 8:00 and 9:00 in the morning, and got in before 8:00 p.m. However, after considering the two options, it didn’t seem like a tough choice to me. I felt it would be easier on the boys if we took the less time consuming trip.
No matter which route I chose, we would start off by having to endure a nearly three-hour ride just to get from home to the airport, so why compound the problem? Besides, this way we also wouldn’t have to get up in the middle of the night to leave for the airport and could sleep a little later in the morning. That would probably make the boys a little easier to deal with, so with this in mind, I sent them to bed. Once they disappeared, I went over my checklist one final time.
I got everyone up the next morning, right on schedule. After the boys were ready, Jake and I loaded them into our vehicles, along with the luggage. We were actually on the road before ten, with me leading the way in the van and Jake following closely behind in the Suburban. I had planned to make only one stop along the way, for drinks and to give everyone a chance to use the restrooms. Even though we wouldn’t be traveling during the rush hour, the one thing I forgot to take into consideration was some unexpected construction along our route.
Since there wasn’t a major highway going from where we lived to the airport, we had to take some older, smaller roads until we could hook up with I-76. As we made our way along these local routes, we encountered crews patching the roadway and, in one spot cutting down trees and tree limbs they suspected might come down during the winter. These work crews slowed us down, as well as the bridge reconstruction on the interstate where traffic was funneled into a single lane in each direction. All of these slowdowns caused us to arrive later than anticipated, but it was still slightly before 1:30, so we still had time to check in for our flight.
Our plane lifted off almost exactly on time, and of course we comprised the largest segment of the passenger list. The boys didn’t have their usual flight entertainment with them, which would have included their computerized games and portable CD players. They didn’t want to bring these devices along on this trip, because they would have had to leave them unprotected as we moved from the first half of our vacation to the second part. We had talked about this before we left and that was when they decided not to take the chance of having anything stolen, so they opted to leave them home instead.
The first leg of the flight went quickly, but there was some bad weather over Cincinnati and we got stacked up in a landing pattern, waiting for the earlier arrivals to land. That wasn’t so bad, because it just cut into our layover time, or so I thought. However, the weather had also delayed the departures, so we were no further ahead. We still had about an hour to kill, but it wasn’t too bad, and of course the boys found their own ways to pass the time. Some walked around and others went to the gift shops, while the rest spent their time checking out the other girls and guys who were wandering around the airport.
When we were called to board, we quickly loaded onto the next plane going to Salt Lake City. The trip lasted a little over an hour and a half, but this time the weather was fabulous. The boys spent some of their time looking out the windows, to see if they recognized anything, and the rest of the time they spent talking to one another or with Jake and me.
I was a little surprised when Peter came back and sat down with us, but I soon discovered why. It wasn’t just to be polite; although that’s the way it started off.
“Pop, I’d really like to thank you again for doing so much for me,” Peter began, “and you really are as wonderful as Ricky told me you were.” I guess I must have looked surprised after he made that comment, so he went on to explain.
“He really did, Sir, I mean Pop,” he apologized, blushing. “Ricky has told me so much about you and I know he really loves you. He thinks you’re about the greatest person who’s ever lived.”
“I think you might be exaggerating a tad,” I told him, hoping to tone this down a bit.
“I’m not, Sir, really,” Peter insisted. “I could tell just by the way he spoke about you and the way he lit up when you rang him up or sent him an email.”
“Well, I love him too,” I assured Peter, “and we’ve always had a special bond. He was my first foster child and adopted son.”
“Yes, he told me,” Peter continued, but now I could see there was something else on his mind.
“Was there something else you wished to discuss?” I asked, to give him a push in the right direction.
“Well, I suppose there is,” he agreed. “I think you know I’m like Ricky, in that I prefer girls but don’t mind doing things with boys either.” I merely nodded in response.
“Well, some of your sons have asked me if I wanted to do things with them, but I wanted to get your approval first,” he announced. I was surprised he was so relaxed with broaching this subject with me.
“All the boys know I don’t mind things like that going on, as long as everyone is agreeable,” I confirmed.
“Yes, Ricky told me the same thing and said you basically knew what everyone did,” he continued. “I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to ask you this, but Ricky convinced me you wouldn’t get upset if I did.”
“That’s correct,” I concurred, “so what did you want to ask me?”
“Well, two of your younger sons asked me to do things with them too,” he told me, “and I wanted to get your approval before I agreed.”
“Out of curiosity, to whom are you referring?” I asked.
“Graham and Andrew have each asked me,” he acknowledged. “Even though Ricky told me Graham is the same age as me, he’s smaller and looks younger.”
“That’s because he was malnourished and neglected before he came to live with me,” I admitted and Peter looked shocked. “That’s all behind us now and Graham has been doing fine, but I will agree he’s not as physically mature as most boys his age. He probably is the equivalent of someone a couple years younger. Is that a problem for you?”
“Oh, no sir, not at all. It’s just that I’ve never done anything with anyone as young as Andrew before, and Graham also appears younger, so I felt I should get your permission first. I think they asked me because none of us are circumcised, but I wouldn’t mind trying something with them, if it meets with your approval.”
“I have no problems with that, since all the boys have been told they could participate,” I informed him. “As I said, as long as you and your partner agree to what you’re planning to do, I won’t object. Just be gentle with Graham. I’m sure he’s a little vulnerable at the moment, since he just lost Cody, so please don’t hurt him.”
“Oh, I won’t, so you don’t have to worry,” he assured me. “I just felt this might let me know what it would have been like if I’d have been brave enough to try things of this nature, before Ricky came to live with us.” I understood, but didn’t pursue that line of thought. Instead, I asked him something.
“Does that answer your question and take care of your problem then?” I asked, just to be certain.
“Yes, Sir, I mean Pop, and thank you,” he said before he went back to his seat. He had a huge grin on his face as he made his way down the aisle, but he did stop and whispered something to both Graham and Andrew before he sat next to Ricky again.
The rest of the flight was uneventful and we enjoyed a smooth landing. As soon as we reached the terminal, we had to rush to catch our next plane. Although our flight landed behind schedule, it did not delay our connecting flight, which was still leaving on time. We hoped our luggage was also being transferred, while we walked as quickly as we could to the appropriate gate.
This meant poor little Andrew nearly had to jog to keep up with the rest of us. Even though he was twelve, and would be thirteen in three months, he was still quite short and couldn’t keep up with the long strides we were taking without running. He didn’t complain, however, which might possibly have been due to the fact that Peter was holding his hand as they went, and we were soon aboard our final flight.
We landed in Jackson around 8:30 Saturday night, grabbed our luggage and then scrambled onto the airport shuttle bus, which we nearly filled. It took us to the motel where we’d be spending the night and I think everyone was getting pretty tired by this point. Before we left home, we had decided who would be sharing rooms for the night, so I gave each group their key, told them to freshen up quickly and then we’d catch a late meal before we called it a night. Outside of breakfast, we’d only snacked during the rest of the day, so I wanted them to have something more substantial before we turned in.
It ended up that we all ordered hamburgers or some sort of sandwich, but we also had fries or a salad to go along with it. It didn’t take us very long to eat, since we weren’t having a large meal, and once we were done, I reminded the boys I would be calling their rooms around 8:00 the next morning. I also explained that I expected them to be ready for breakfast by 9:00, because our chartered bus would be arriving around 10:00 to take us to Yellowstone. They all said they understood and we went back to our rooms.
That night Andrew spent some time with Peter before they hit the sack. Although they weren’t sharing a room together, they were able to find a place they could do what they wanted, without someone watching them or interfering in what they had planned. Neither Peter nor Andrew was shy about being naked in front of the others, but they didn’t want their sexual exploration to become a spectacle. Therefore, they talked the others sharing the room they were going to use into spending some time with others, so they could be alone.
“I hope you don’t think I’m a baby, because I’m so small and don’t have any hair down there yet,” Andrew stated, once they were alone.
“Blimey, I’ve seen you naked and never thought that about you,” Peter announced, shocked. “Besides, babies certainly can’t produce the quality of art you did, so I’d never think that.” Andrew smiled.
“I know I can draw,” he confirmed, “but I do have a wiener like a baby.”
“Will you promise not to share what I tell you with anyone?” Peter asked, hopefully, and Andrew nodded eagerly.
“I didn’t get any hair down there and my willy didn’t grow until I was older than you are now,” Peter confessed. “In fact, I was worried Ricky would arrive before it happened, but I started puberty a few months before he reached Australia. It went fairly quickly after that, but I know how I worried too.”
“Really, you were like me?” Andrew asked, his mouth agape.
“Absolutely,” Peter confirmed. “And the only thing that happened when I wanked was the tingly feeling, but nothing came out.”
“That’s the way it is for me too,” Andrew agreed. Suddenly, he was feeling better about his own situation, knowing Peter had gone through something similar but was now just like everyone else.
Once that was settled, the boys agreed to masturbate each other, but that was it. In fact, Peter had never done much more with Ricky or his schoolmates, but it was more than enough for Andrew. In fact, the next time I saw him, he still had a special glow, so I knew the encounter had gone well.
The following morning, I received my wake-up call from the front desk at 7:45 and immediately began to call all the other rooms to make sure the boys were also getting up. I heard various sons groggily answer their phones and promise they’d get the others up and moving, so I jumped in the shower and got dressed.
About 8:10, I decided to walk to each of the rooms, just to check on how things were proceeding, and everything was going great until I came to the room in which Shannon, Ricky, Danny and Brandon were staying. Ricky had answered the phone, but it was now obvious he had fallen back to sleep, instead of rousing the others. My knock at the door got Danny out of bed, and while he was waking Brandon and Shannon, I filled their ice bucket with cold water and took it over and emptied it on my blond angel. I figured it was what Ricky might have done to one of us in the same situation and payback is a bitch.
He leapt out of bed, as the cold water shocked his body into consciousness, and started screaming, “I’m going to get whichever bastard did this!” When he looked around, the other boys were laughing, but then he noticed me, still holding the bucket.
“That was your punishment for not waking the others, as I asked you to do,” I told him. He shot me a bone-chilling glare, to let me know he wasn’t happy with the sentence I’d carried out.
“Dad, that was heartless,” he whined.
“True, and exactly the type of thing you would have done, if our roles had been reversed.” After listening to me say this, he was unable to hide a little smirk that spread across his lips, as he realized I was probably correct in my assessment.
“Okay, I’m sorry I didn’t get up and wake the others when you called,” he apologized. “I guess I was just so tired that I dozed off again.”
“Well, now I need all of you to get moving, because you’re already lagging behind the others. We’re meeting up for breakfast at 9:00, so hustle, unless you don’t want to eat.” They certainly didn’t want that to happen, so they started racing about getting ready and I went back to my room.
Ricky’s group only slowed us down a couple of minutes, even though they actually got started much later than the others. Now, we went off to eat and were in and out of the restaurant in pretty good time. Once we finished, we went back to our rooms, collected our belongings and loaded everything onto the bus when it arrived. I had chartered a bus and driver to haul us around during our vacation, since it was the easiest way to get so many people from one place to another. It also meant Jake and I didn’t have to worry about doing the driving and getting lost.
Soon we were on our way and heading toward Yellowstone National Park, our first stop. As we drove north from Jackson, we could see the Grand Teton Mountain Range looming off to the west. It was quite an impressive sight, with the Grand Teton being the highest peak, at 13,770 feet, but there were also twelve other peaks in the range that topped the 12,000-foot mark as well. We could also see Jackson Lake along the way and that was quite an amazing site too. It took us a couple of hours to reach the south entrance to Yellowstone, the first and oldest of the national parks. It was established in 1872, in a fairly remote part of the country, but we soon discovered it was worth the effort.
Shortly after we entered the park, we came across Moose Falls, which cascaded down the slope, from the plateau above, and into the deep canyon of Lewis River. A little farther on, we passed a second falls, Lewis Falls, which had a lesser plunge of thirty-seven feet. They both appeared to be pristine and still filled visitors with awe. One couldn’t help but wonder what the Native Americans and early explorers thought when they first beheld such splendor.
“Does anyone want to venture a guess as to whom the Lewis River and Lewis Falls were named for?” I asked, to insert an educational element in our vacation.
“Was it the Lewis, from Lewis and Clark?” Cole asked, and everyone looked at him in surprise. It’s true Cole had his problems with academics, but once he learned something, it was his for life.
“Correct,” I agreed. “They were both named for Meriwether Lewis, who was one of the first to explore this area.”
From there we made our way to West Thumb, which extends from the western end of Yellowstone Lake. West Thumb got its name from a description given by the Washburn party in 1870, in which they noted the lake was shaped like “a human hand with the fingers extended and spread apart as much as possible.” This eventually gave way to calling this area West Thumb, as this is the location where the thumb would have been if the lake were a hand. From here we took a walking tour of the West Thumb geyser basin, which is sometimes referred to as “Potts Basin,” after Daniel T. Potts, a trapper from the 1820’s.
As we took our walking tour of the West Thumb geyser basin, we noticed it was filled with a collection of pools, bubbling mud pots and glistening geysers. It was quite interesting, very peaceful and the beauty of the area just seemed to relax you completely.
“Looking at the bubbling mud reminds me of how my stomach felt the last time I drank too much,” Frankie told Dustin, although the rest of us easily overheard his comment. I decided not to pursue that topic and chose to make another comment instead.
“Believe it or not, this whole park covers a super volcano,” I announced, which quickly garnered everyone’s attention. “It’s the volcanic action below the surface that causes the mud to bubble and sets the geysers off. Scientists claim that someday, and possibly in the very near future, this could be the sight of a major volcanic eruption.”
“I hope it’s after we leave,” Pat stated, sarcastically, which caused the others to start laughing.
Once we finished up at the park, we went to Grant Village, where we were going to spend the night. Grant Village was named in honor of the 18th president, Ulysses S. Grant, who signed the 1872 bill that made Yellowstone the world’s first national park.
I had made reservations at the Roosevelt Lodge and signed us up for the Old West Dinner Cookout. We were transported in canvas-covered wagons over the three miles to Pleasant Valley, where the cookout was to take place.
“Can you imagine riding in a wagon like this, when you’re parents decided to move you from where you’d been living to a new location in the west?” Sammy asked, and I could see the awe and excitement in his face as he thought about it.
“You mean like Laura Ingalls Wilder did, in ‘Little House on the Prairie?” Andrew wondered, since he seemed interested in the idea too.
“It would be slow, long and boring,” Graham added,” but I wouldn’t have minded it, as long as there were no Indians on the war path in the areas we’d be traveling.”
The other boys agreed, before Danny noted that we weren’t very far from the Little Big Horn, where General Custer and his men died. That sent a chill up everyone’s spine and they remained silent, as they thought about that and many other things.
The ride took just over thirty minutes, and forced you to realize that most pioneers never ventured very far from home, just because it took so long just to make a simple trip. Since we had done so much traveling as a family, I’m not sure the boys could appreciate the idea of being limited to how much you could do and how far you’d travel in your lifetime. In fact, most families travel more in one year than most of our ancestors did in their entire lifetime.
The meal was served buffet-style and we ate on picnic tables, under a canvas roof, which was provided for inclement weather. The food was good, there was plenty of it and it was a nice change from our typical vacation meals. Except for the steak, everything else was all-you-can-eat. The rest of the meal consisted of coleslaw, potato salad, baked beans, chuck wagon corn, corn muffins, watermelon, apple cobbler and various beverages.
While we ate, a guitar-playing vocalist entertained us. He was fairly decent, but the boys weren’t interested in the old country songs he sang. All of us enjoyed the meal and some of us liked the entertainment, but then it was time to return to the lodge. We rode back in the wagons, which weren’t moving fast enough for most of my sons and many were growing anxious to do something else.
When we finally arrived at the Roosevelt, I told the boys they were on their own for the rest of the evening, but if they wanted to wander around, they were to go out in groups of no fewer than three. They all agreed, so Jake and I went to our room to unwind. All the walking we had done earlier had taken its toll on me and I knew we’d be doing even more walking over the next few days. With that in mind, I wanted to make sure I got enough rest, since I didn’t want to become a drag on the others. Jake and I sprawled out on the bed and talked for a while, before we got up, showered and then turned in for the night.
The boys who went off to explore didn’t return for a few hours and I understood they managed to do a variety of things in the meantime. A few of them decided to check out more of the area, while some tried to meet up with other visitors to the park and the rest merely decided to go back to their rooms to enjoy a little private time with one of the others. Seeing my grandsons weren’t with us on this trip, I had lifted most of the restrictions about having sex and only left the ‘no pick-ups rule’ in place. I also asked them to be considerate of the others sharing the room and not take advantage of the situation. Mark and Frankie were sharing with Jake and me, so I didn’t have to worry about either of them seeing more than they might wish to.
I also noticed that Trey and Dion had decided to share a room with Kevin and Vinnie throughout the entire trip, as they were paired up and didn’t wish to mess around with any of the others. Actually, Vinnie and Kevin have been good for each other and being paired together had done a lot for each of them. Vinnie had what he wanted and needed most. This didn’t merely mean someone to love, but he also had what he desired with someone who was willing to share everything with him, including those tedious exercises and workouts he had to endure.
In return, Kevin had finally found a partner who was not only willing to commit himself to just Kevin, but hopefully someone whom he wouldn’t have to worry about losing. He had lost so much already, with Dustin, Nick and Brent, that I was truly happy for him. Hell, I was happy for both of them, as well as for Trey and Dion, because they also shared a strong commitment to each other. I think I had two couples that would probably spend the rest of their lives together.