Thursday, September 26, 2024

One Of Those People

Last year, we stopped in and spent about an hour at Dead Horse Point State Park while we were on a vacation.

While we were there, Little decided that he wanted a sticker for his souvenir. It was one of those stickers you would put in your back window or on your bumper. Not really sure why he wanted such a thing, but that's what he picked.

Months went by, and he did nothing with the sticker. When my wife told him to take it off the bar in the kitchen and go put it away in his room somewhere, he decided that he didn't have anywhere for it to go. Instead, he asked my wife if he could put it on her car. She frowned, but couldn't really give a good reason why she shouldn't allow him, so she said okay.

The next day, I went out to get into my truck...and found that Little's sticker was on my back window, not my the window of my wife's car. Little changed his mind on the way out to put the sticker on, and decided he didn't need to bother asking me. So, I had a big window sticker on my truck.

For a long time, that's how it stayed. But then, just a few weeks ago, we went out to Yellowstone National Park, and while we were in the gift shop, I thought, "What if I got another window sticker from Yellowstone, and I become one of those people who has lots of stickers from their travels in their window?"

I went for it. I got a sticker for Yellowstone, then one for Lewis and Clark Caverns when we stayed a day there, and then one from Waterton National Park in Canada when we spent a day there. My single sticker in the window was now four. But I never do anything part way (that's not generally true, but sometimes it is).

When we got back from our trip, a big pack of stickers that my wife had ordered from Amazon for Little to decorate his school folders with. They were camping related stickers, and there were 200 of them. Little went through them and chose the ones he wanted, and when I asked him if I could use some of the other ones on my car, he agreed. 

These stickers were basically the kind of thing you might find in a visitor center somewhere. It was possible that they might fade really fast or something, because they were so cheap, but I rolled the dice and gave it a shot. I went through and picked all the stickers that were portraying something that I had been to, from Cancun and San Francisco to Arches National Park and Yosemite National Park. Now I had stickers on both the driver and passenger side windows.

My wife told me I could get stickers like these even cheaper from Temu. I don't have a lot of trust in Temu, but my wife loves it. She ordered me a pack of National Park stickers from Temu, and we waited for them to arrive. When they showed up, they were minuscule. Way too small to work on a window. The last set of stickers I used were a little small, there were about half the size of those.

"Whoops, sorry," my wife said, and we put the stickers in a drawer in case we ever wanted to use them for something in the future. They had only cost $1, after all, so it wasn't a big deal. I decided to give Temu a second chance. This time, I went through and bought separate stickers, rather than a huge pack, because the stickers in the packs were too small. The separate stickers must be larger.

Well, those stickers came last night, and I hadn't considered how much larger those stickers might be. Look at the sticker compared to the size of my hand!

That thing is as big as my hand with the fingers outstretched. It's huge! And almost all of them were that large. Only two of them were the right size to be a window sticker. I was irritated. I sorted through the stickers, and took the few of them that were on the smaller side of the huge ones, and still put them on. So, my windows look like this now:


If you can't tell, the Grand Teton National Park sticker is one of the new ones...it was the smallest of the big ones.

The Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park and the Glacier National Park stickers are the new ones on this side. Those are both really big, but they're narrow at least, so they don't look as ridiculous. I considered using another one, but I just couldn't do it. Too freaking big.

I guess I'll have to see if I can't find some stickers somewhere on Temu or maybe even go over to Amazon and pay full price to get new stickers to replace the ones that I got that are too big. We'll see if I can't manage.

But I am definitely one of those people now.

2 comments:

Journey Into... said...

Are you still "sticking" to places you've been to? When were you at Glacier National Park? I went there when I was a kid, but would love to go back again. I have been to Lewis and Clark Caverns many times. It's pretty close to where I grew up.

Big Anklevich said...

I see what you did there. Yeah, those are all places I've been to. We've gone to Glacier several times, because my in-laws live right across the border from there.

We drove across the border from Canada heading back into the United States through Glacier and went over Going-to-the-Sun Road as part of our honeymoon when I got married. We went as a family once back in 2015:

http://biganklevich.blogspot.com/2015/07/galcier-national-park.html

And then again for a day when we were in Canada for another visit:

http://biganklevich.blogspot.com/2016/07/iceberg-lake.html

Glacier is one of my favorite places of all. I almost went another time this past summer, but instead we went to the Waterton side of the Glacier-Waterton International Peace Park and did a bunch of hiking there.