Family Vacation

The Barclay family vacation has stalled in the middle of nowhere. Their car has quit on a Saturday afternoon somewhere between Odyssey and Florida, and George Barclay, certain the trouble is the radiator, twists off the cap and nearly scalds himself when it pops. While Mary checks on him and Donna insists that the stranger walking up behind the car must be an axe murderer, the stranger calmly explains that you should never open a hot radiator. His name is Chester, his own car has broken down a quarter mile back, and one look under the hood tells him the Barclays have a dry carburetor, a full gas tank, and a dead fuel pump.

Chester runs the service station in the tiny town of Hopwood, where the gas pumps, store, restaurant, and souvenir shop all share one building. He tows the car in and lets Jimmy ride in the truck cab, which Jimmy likes very much, even if calling a grown-up by his first name feels strange. The news at the station is worse than the tow: the replacement fuel pump cannot arrive until Monday, there is no motel closer than twenty miles, and Chester's answer to all of it is an invitation. He has a big house, plenty of room, and a wife who has been cooking all day for tomorrow's church picnic. George is unsure whether the man is remarkably generous or up to something, and asks God for a clue. The words church picnic arrive about two seconds later.

At Chester's farmhouse the Barclays meet Grace, who cheerfully refuses to let Mary lift a finger and puts Donna to work peeling potatoes instead. Ted, the only one of Chester and Grace's eight children still at home, is exactly Jimmy's age. Out on the enormous back porch Jimmy proposes a game of space aliens with brooms for lightsabers, and Ted counters with something better: he plays David, hunted by King Saul, with a hidden fort down by the creek that stands in for the brook of Besor. The two boys fight off the Philistines until dinner, and Jimmy comes to the table soaking wet. Meanwhile George, who has never cared for that sort of thing, has been eyeing Chester's fishing poles and asks Mary whether he may go out on the lake before church.

Nearly everyone is having a wonderful time. Donna is not. Her nail polish is ruined, her tape player has no batteries, and she has decided the whole place is boring. Jimmy is up before dawn to milk the cow and gather eggs, the fishermen come back with no fish and one very funny story, and Sunday school with Mr. Bostich involves real live animals loose in the church, which the pastor preaches straight through. At the picnic Donna sulks under a tree while her mother loses the egg toss on purpose, so Jimmy brings her the one thing he has been saving: Whit's Boredom Buster, a puzzle box Mr. Whittaker gave him with instructions to open it only when he was truly, thoroughly bored.

Donna expects it to be easy. An hour later she finally cracks it, and the little machine lights up to tell her that all the time she spent working on it was time she was not bored. Talked into the tug-of-war as the last game of the day, she lands face first in the mud - and comes up laughing. That night she telephones her best friend back in Odyssey to report that she has been having a blast. When the family drives away Monday morning with a new fuel pump and promises to return, Donna discovers she has left her cassette player behind at Chester's. She says she does not need it anymore.