COLUMN. Ribbedebie to Walibi (Zandhoven)
My vacation is already over. I’ve been home for two weeks. At home, in Pulle. It has not become much exotic. On Facebook I saw holiday snaps of all my 621 friends. I love pictures taken in Puerto Rico, Iceland and Ibiza and an inch of pictures taken in mainland Spain and the south of France. The children’s classmates posed in Times Square in New York and on sandy beaches in Greece: I liked them all. For real.
My children are not on Facebook, the flow of feel-good images of people we know from afar and a little less far just passed them by. Fortunately, otherwise they might also want to go on a plane to the sun and we don’t have the money for that. Nor is it good for the environment, that goes without saying. “But aren’t we going to do something?” the youngest whined long before the holiday had started. He is 10 years old and very content. I had promised him last year to spend five days at Europapark in Germany, but when I finally wanted to book the hotel, it turned out to be completely full. Also in the five other hotels near the amusement park this summer it turned out that there was no place left to sleep our family of four. So I made new promises (“We will definitely go next year’s holiday.”) and announced a day trip to Walibi, about the only amusement park we haven’t been to yet.
On Facebook I looked for some videos of raging rollercoasters and screaming girls. My son got really excited about it and wanted me to buy tickets right away. Half a minute later I had lost 180 euros. One hundred and eighty euros, please. And then I still had to pay the parking ticket of 10 euros. For a day trip.
The night before us, I fully charged my cell phone because I wanted to post fun pictures on my social media, of roller coasters and tree trunks, of smiling children’s faces and endless happiness.
It turned out differently. In the car to Wavre, which according to my husband was “next to the Anderlecht stadium”, but in reality it was still a full hour’s drive away, the rain fell from the sky at the same time. “That’s nothing”, my husband tries to maintain the atmosphere. “It would be much worse if it were 40 degrees.”
Our oldest son was sleeping in the backseat, having played the first three miles of his pearls, demanding that music be played other than the music I’d chosen in the car: the two hundred most streamed pictures from the eighties. “What the hell?mom. Yo, Real. What is this? Are we like that for 80 years? Then set up NWA or something.” When I did not immediately follow his plea, he threatened to get off on the Antwerp Ring. So I put on a rap record. We hadn’t even left the Craeybeckx tunnel when it had already slumped in dreamland. That’s what you get with teenagers.
In Walibi he suffered from a morning mood, his brother became completely hyper at the sight of so many roller coasters. “I want yellow first, then blue, red and black…” He gasped. “In the white, in the…”
“We’re just following the route,” I interrupted him. “And we’ll start with the red one, because that’s the first we come across.” Because the rest of the family can be indecisive, I took the lead and walked to the entrance of the Vampire, where we immediately queue for half an hour. In progress my eldest is totally on his hips. “Yo mom, really. What are you wearing? And don’t talk so loud, everyone is watching us. And what are you going to do? Oh no, don’t take pictures, really! Stoop.”
After a ride of less than a minute, in which we went over several times, I stepped towards the next roller coaster. Behind me my two sons were rolling on the ground fighting and behind them my husband was smoking a cigarette. My barometer quietly shifted towards a thunderstorm. When I didn’t finish my handbag either, the entire contents clattered onto the walkway: tampons, wallet, ballpoint pens, a book, teenage slippers, parking ticket, can of Monster, cans of Red Bull, muffler. “Oh no”, my husband called from afar. “What have you got in there too?”
“Yeah, it’s all my fault,” I grumbled under my breath. The next attraction was the Pulsar, a kind of boat that is pulled up and then perpendicularly down. “Oh mama, I’m so scared”, said the youngest. “Because you told me yesterday that a child died in that amusement park in Denmark.”
My husband looked at me angrily. “What did you say?” I shrug. “A child has died this week when a container came loose in an amusement park in real Denmark. That’s news, isn’t it.” At that moment our boat came loose and I got a wave of water screaming loudly over me. I was soaked when I clambered out of the attraction. “Really”, my son said, and sniffed. “You can see everything through that white T-shirt you’re wearing.” I bit my lip, even when my husband wanted to drink a can of beer at every drinking stall. And so the day passed.
That evening I opened Facebook to post the pictures I had taken. No pictures of our family, but of a random tourist with a huge neck carpet and two pictures of the shabby Dutch that I encountered everywhere in the park. “Independence from walking required” and “diapers are available from the customers who have abused the treatment”. Nice, but not so nice that it was liked en masse. The good news is that we have made our contribution to the fight against global warming. Our ecological other footprint is even smaller than the years.