My husband is the impatient type. The kind of guy who peeked at his gifts under the Christmas tree when he was a kid. He’s still pretty much that same kid today, a 52 year old Scorpio boy child who finds an odd delight in trying to figure out what everyone has gotten him for his November birthday and Christmas. He’s a package shaker, he tries to gaze through the wrapping paper as if he’s wearing X-Ray glasses, and weighs the gifts in his hands before boldly announcing what he thinks might be inside. And as much as I hate to admit it, he’s right about 75% of the time.
So this year, I decided Eddie needed to learn a lesson. It was a lesson that took planning, a combination of deception and misdirection, dedication, and an accomplice who wanted to teach Eddie that lesson as much as I did: his older sister Laura.
For one solid year, Laura and I have been planning my husband’s first trip out of the country for his birthday, and to arrange it so that he didn’t have a clue until he had to pull out his passport and hand it over to the authorities.
We had to find a date as close as possible to Eddie returning home from his job refurbishing the road around the rim of Crater Lake, sometime around Halloween. So we found the first available dates in November for a week at the Torres Mazatlan resort. Then I asked for a week off of work, which is no small feat. Before it would be approved, I had to find a volunteer who was willing to cover a classical music radio show for six days in a row. Once that was accomplished, Laura booked our rooms at the resort and flights from Medford, Oregon.
And then the misdirection began.
When we were visiting Laura last January, she started talking about how much she’d love to have us join her in Puerto Vallarta where she usually spends a few weeks at her timeshare. We sat down within earshot of Eddie – all part of the plan – and looked at availability. We put on authentic sad faces when we couldn’t find anything within the timeframes that might work. Nothing in November. Nothing in December. Nothing in January, February, March or April. How about Mazatlan? Nothing there either? Oh well. It was a wonderful thought, we said. But just in case something opened up, Eddie would get his very first passport, and I would renew mine.
The pool, restaurant & bar at Torres Mazatlan Resort.
Then life went on for almost an entire year. In the summer, Eddie went back to Crater Lake, and while he was gone his sister and I would touch base occasionally about our top secret plan.
The entire mission almost fell apart more than once. First, the volunteer who had agreed to cover my radio show suffered a fall that left him with a severe head injury, putting him on the sidelines. But since my vacation had already been approved and the non-refundable tickets purchased, other staff stepped in to cover the shifts. Then Eddie called one day to tell me that his crew might have another job lined up in Eastern Oregon as soon as they wrapped up their season at Crater Lake. As it turned out, the job never materialized, but in a moment of panic, I told Eddie that he wasn’t allowed to make any plans for the week before or after his birthday, and that he would just have to tell his boss he needed that time off.
I came to regret that. It unleashed the curious little boy in my husband, who – from that moment forward – hounded me day and night for the next 6 weeks about what we had planned. And it drove him crazy that I wouldn’t tell him. I eventually got so tired of him demanding to know, that I started making up places. I told him we were going on a mission trip to Puerto Rico. We were going to Mall of America, home of the largest indoor water amusement park in the world. We were taking a cruise to Alaska to visit my old hometown. We had rented a chateau in France. We were going back to Hawaii to rent the submarine that was used in the TV show “Lost” which has now been turned into an AirBnB (I’m sure it actually hasn’t). I told him I had rented one of those homes perched on pilings over a lagoon in Fiji. I even told him I had rented a palapa on a beach in Mexico with hammocks for beds, which was about as close as I ever got to the truth. I told him we were going to Cuba, where I’d rented a ’57 Ford Fairlane, and I told him that we were finally going to use the 3 night stay at a beach house my mother had gifted us for our wedding anniversary at Ken Kesey’s home in Yachats.
It was at that point that Eddie proudly announced that he had everything figured out.
The Yachats Theory
His hypothesis – and it was a good one, I’ll give him that – was that we were going to drive to the Oregon Coast, stay with his sister near Coos Bay for a few days before driving up to Yachats to the Key-Sea Koast House, and then continuing on to visit his nieces and nephews in Astoria, one of whom had just provided Eddie with a new grand nephew that had still been cooking in the oven the last time Uncle Eddie visited his family. I told him I could neither confirm nor deny, which had become my standard answer whenever queried about the trip, which was about every 3 minutes.
To prove his hypothesis, when I was out of the room, Eddie started a con game of his own. He called his sister and proclaimed that I had come clean with the whole secret, and told him about our travel plans. His sister did her best to seem shocked that he knew everything, then said she couldn’t wait to see us. Then when I was home, Eddie Face Timed his sister while I was in the room, and laughed gleefully as he told me that he’d tricked her into acknowledging our trip to see her, proving his hypothesis. Then it was my turn to play shocked, as I told his sister, “How could you fall for his ruse, Laura?! You were supposed to neither confirm nor deny!” and then I played hurt, bummed that Eddie had, once again, figured out his gift.
The End Game
The night before we left town, I began packing Eddie’s bag for him, selecting a mixture of warm and cool weather clothing. He too-casually said, “Hey throw my cologne in there, would you?” and I did. To which he replied, “Ha! I knew it! We’re definitely not flying to Astoria! The TSA would never allow a bottle that big!” I smiled and said, “Oh, you got me. But I will neither confirm nor deny.” And then I added another mental item to my checklist (which included grabbing our passports after he was already in the car warming it up) which was to remember to remove the cologne bottle from his bag as we headed to the airport, and give him his only physical birthday gift this year, a travel sized bottle of Armani Code I had purchased from Macy’s that day. Because I know my husband and I’m hep to all of his tricks.
I let him pack our winter coats and boots. I let him heft an armload of bottled water and snacks out to the car. And I told him he couldn’t bring the dogs, because NO, and let him think that it was because pets aren’t allowed at the vacation rental. Eddie’s sister texted him that she couldn’t wait to see us, and she’d been getting our room prepared. Then she sent a few random photos of plants in her yard, showing Eddie all the hard work she’d been doing landscaping. All part of the con.
Visiting my family in Ashland that evening, Eddie continued to brag to everyone he came into contact with that he had figured out our plans. He told my daughter’s boyfriend, who said, “Wait. I thought you guys were going to Cuba. You’re not going to Cuba?” He thanked my mom for the gift of the beach house stay, and my mom said, “You know, there’s more than one bedroom, you could take me with you.” I finally played the last card in my hand by saying, “You know, I’m okay with getting an early start. So we can leave as early as you want tomorrow morning,” before yawning and heading off to bed at 9pm. Because I knew how early that alarm clock was going to ring.
3am
“It’s go time,” I proclaimed as I shut off the alarm. “Time to get up.”
Eddie asked me what time it was (I misdirected, with “It’s early, I couldn’t sleep.”). He said he needed a few more minutes, and I obliged him as I hastily dressed in the dark and got everything ready, but by 3:15 Eddie was already in the car, warming it up. Ready to head to the coast. I came out, sat in the passenger seat, and as he started to put the car in reverse, I said, “Honey, you need to get out of the car.”
He told me to quit playing. Told me to fasten my seat belt and shut the door so we could leave. I told him he needed to come out to the back of the car and help me with something. He grumpily got out of the car and into the rainy night. Standing under the carport, I handed him the little red Macy’s bag with the cologne and said, “Here’s your birthday present, now take the other bottle of cologne out of your bag, then turn off the car, and put the keys in the house. We’re not driving.”
Eddie was dumbfounded.
In fact, he simply didn’t believe me. He told me to stop playing again, said there was no use playing this game any longer because he KNEW where we were going, and it was freezing out so let’s go. I grabbed his phone, started to film him, and said, “Do you think your sister and I don’t have you pegged?” And I’ll just let the video below speak for itself…but beware, there are a few uncharacteristic F-bombs dropped by my sleepy, impatient, bewildered husband in his hazy state of denial:
Eddie was still sitting in the car, engine on, when the shuttle van came around the corner two minutes later. I wish I still had the camera going, because that’s when he realized that his theory wasn’t correct, and that he really didn’t have a clue about what was happening. His first reaction? “I gotta poop.” And he ran back inside.I greeted the shuttle driver and he started grabbing our bags. When we arrived at the airport, Eddie tried to bribe the the guy into telling him where we were going, and the driver said, “Dude, I got no clue where you’re headed.” And of course, he did. I’d told him as we were transferring our bags from car to van, removing the cologne, winter coats and anything else I knew we didn’t need for the trip.Because I had sneakily checked us in the night before, and had our boarding passes digitally downloaded onto my phone, Eddie still didn’t know where we were headed as we went through TSA screening at the airport, but knew we were headed northbound via Portland when we got in line to head out to board the plane. He asked me where we were going. I asked him, “I don’t know, where ARE we going?” He said, “Either we’re going to Hawaii, or Alaska.”
When we arrived in Portland, Eddie said he thought we might be renting a car and driving down the Oregon Coast instead of up. Then I headed to another gate (honest mistake!) that was boarding a flight to Honolulu, but got directions to the correct place and finally boarded a flight headed in the right direction, to Los Angeles.
It wasn’t until we were landing in L.A. and I pulled our passports out of the secret pocket sewn in my purse that Eddie found out where we were headed, and then he didn’t believe me. Thought I was still misleading him. Then suddenly we were in the plane, headed to Mazatlan, and Eddie advanced into the next state of dumbfounded disbelief that he’d been had.
By the time we’d landed in Mazatlan however, Eddie had retained his earlier smugness, proclaiming that at least he was going to experience Mazatlan before his sister did, since she always vacations a few hours south, in Puerto Vallarta.
I let him think that, until the moment we walked through the gates of the resort, and a bell hop greeted us with “Buenos tardes, you are meeting friends?”
“No,” said Eddie confidently. “We’re here alone.”
“Actually,” I said, “We’re not meeting friends. But we are meeting family.”
It was then that Eddie’s sister came around the corner, all smiles and already tan. She’d beaten us to Mazatlan by a week, and while she was indeed getting our room ready for us, it was our oceanfront condo, not the hideaway bed in the basement.
The look on Eddie’s face at that moment was worth everything Laura and I did. He was stupified. The man who made it his mission to always figure out was going on so that there were never any surprises, was surprised. The whole way. This was one present that stayed wrapped until his birthday, even though it took the help of literally every human I came into contact with for a month to pull it off. And now Eddie knows just how far his sister and I are willing to go to pull off a long con.
It was a glorious week. The sound of the surf was so loud that we had to close the sliding door at night so we could sleep. The fresh banana margaritas were delicious enough that I could sip on them all day long in the pool, and weak enough that I never had a hangover, and the gracious and kind staff appreciated my attempts to recall four years of high school Spanish classes (¡ Muchas gracias, señora Brewold!).
We launched another surprise on Eddie when Eddie’s friend Luis – a native Mexican – showed up a few days later with his family, increasing our group to seven. Then we grew to nine when more family from Guanajuato showed up. A third of us spoke only English, a few spoke only Spanish, and a few of us spoke in varying levels of both languages. That was when the fun really started, because we were living life like a Mexican on vacation showing off for his family (because that’s exactly what was going on).
Half of our gang: my partner in crime Laura,
la chiquita Layla, la abuela, Blanca y yo
The gang ended up (more than once) in the back of a pick up truck outfitted with benches, a cooler full of Pacifico Clara and a big bag of chicharrones, singing Mexican songs at the top of our lungs (as well as making up my own lyrics to Despacito after hearing it for maybe the 8th time) while driving around the city. We ended up surrounded by two mariachi bands (because uno mariachi band was apparently not enough) who serenaded us while we put away huge platters of ceviche y pescado at a restaurant with tables in the middle of the street across from a car wash, and I have a vague memory of singing karaoke on our last noche en Mazatlan to one of the canciones I was exposed to during that lovely semana en Mexico that – lo mismo que yo – gets the point across in a blend of English y Espanol, and just happens to reference driving around in a truck with chicharrones and having a very very good time! You’ll hear a version of that song, “Las Mulas de Moreno” kicking off the accompanying Mazatlan Long Con playlist below, filled with the music of Mexico that I was surrounded with as part of the incredible pay off to the Mazatlan Long Con. I hope you enjoy it, and feel free to share your favorite songs of Mexico as well in the comments section below.
A short note to my tale: Now that we’re back from Eddie’s birthday surprise trip, he’s seemed a little worried over the past couple of days. My birthday is less than two weeks ago, and Eddie says he just doesn’t know how he’ll be able to come close to topping his birthday present. Plus, all he got me was a new pair of boots. At least I’m pretty sure that’s what’s in the box.
