The wrong place at the right time

This may be another one of those "you had to be there" type things. I tend to have a lot of those. Upon getting smacked in the head with a plastic pumpkin last night and husband commenting about I was in the wrong place and the wrong time, it brought back a memory of the wrong place at the RIGHT time. Or at least I think so.

Which went down in history, and will forever be known as "The Lady Who Got Shrek'd". And yes, I mean like Shrek from the movie.

It was summer of I think 2005. We take a family vacation to the beach every year, and this year we talked my parents into going. They detest the beach in the summer- yeah, I find it weird too. But, they went. It was a great time, great weather, we really had a lot of fun! But, that isn't the point of my story.

The beach was about a 6 1/2 hr drive from where we lived at the time. We were all tired of being in the car when we got there, and so when we checked in, my mom went ahead and took daughter to the room while we unloaded all of our stuff.

Between the 3 of us and a luggage cart, we get it all in about one load. I get to the room and go to open the door and it won't open, so I start knocking. My mom opens the door just a crack, with a pale face and a look of almost terror on it. Daughter is sitting by the closed balcony door crying "I want my Shrek!!!"

There are many things that someone could have thought, but I just went ahead and asked what was going on. My mom opens the door like she is a felon, and my daughter is crying, and we haven't been there but about 20 minutes.

"What is going on?" I ask.

To which my mom responds quickly but quietly "She (daughter) threw her Shrek off of the balcony and hit some lady in the head and now she's down there laying on the concrete by the pool."

I'm sorry, but this is already funny.

After my mom quickly rushes us into the room (I am assuming she thought the knocking from me was the hotel staff or an angry family member seeking revenge), she says that they got in the room and daughter wanted to see the ocean. So mom opened the balcony door. Daughter was really into Shrek at this time, and had a small one that she carried around. When she went to grab the rail on the balcony, she dropped Shrek. He had a very soft body, but a very plastic head and the horns didn't feel that great! He was only about 3-4" tall, but I assume from the 3rd floor balcony, that he quickly goes head-down and gains speed.

Yeah it couldn't have felt good at all.

Shrek comes plummeting from the 3rd floor, and at just the right (or wrong, depending on your sense of humor) time, a lady is walking in that very spot, and Shrek hits her right on the head. She promptly falls to the ground, I am assuming from being startled, and people gather around her. No, she isn't unconscious, and we later spotted her at several different occasions getting drunk (or possibly nursing a migraine? HA- ok, sorry), so she wasn't actually injured.

Daughter cries multiple times for her Shrek throughout the vacation, which everyone refuses to go try to find because this day and age, you never know who might sue you, and we need gas money to get back home. The lady was fine, and yes if she was visibly injured we would have went down there. There are just some times that you need to remain anonymous.

A few days later we are in the kiddie pool, and this boy has a Shrek. It is the exact one that daughter had, so we ask him where he got it from. He tried to make up this big story about how he brought it with him, but we knew he was lying, and thus Shrek (otherwise known as evidence) was returned to his rightful owner. My mom promptly runs over to the beach chair with Shrek and wraps him up in multiple layers of towels. Yeah, she spent the majority of the vacation being paranoid after said incident, and giving us scowling looks when we laughed about it until we cried. I guess she would have been deemed the accomplice, and so she never really found the humor in it.

We spent a good bit of the rest of vacation time peeking over the balcony for anyone who looked like a potential witness before going out there, and my dad and husband would just burst into laughter at random times when they thought of the woman who got Shrek'd. The first night after the incident, they were laughing so hard at dinner that the drinks were sloshing out of the glasses. Thankfully we were in a loud restaurant, and so they didn't stand out too much with their fits of hysterical laughter.

After I got "Shrek'd" with the plastic pumpkin last night, it made me think of that day and how that lady -I am sure- talked about how she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Except that it was just too funny not to laugh, and so in my opinion she was in the wrong place at just the exact right time. At least from our vantage point. Yeah, we have that crude sense of humor.

I brought the Shrek back home and still have him to this day. He lives in daughters baby keepsake box, I am sure a first in the history of keepsake boxes- at least for the same reasons as us. I don't think he'll make any more trips to hotels- unless we're staying on the ground level of course.