Season 9, Week 1 entry...
When you live near Sturgis, South Dakota, the summer season is most closely associated with an event referred to simply as 'the rally' by most people. Every year, a huge motorcycle rally brings several hundred thousand visitors to the area. A town of 6,000 in the off-season swells almost unimaginably as nearly a half million bikers descend upon the area for July and August. For the actual week of the rally in early August, main street is shut down so it can become a motorcycle-only street. Tents and carts sell all manner of wares: food, clothing, bike parts, leather riding gear, and leather of a more, let's say, recreational nature. And of course, you get all sorts of interesting people and their various bikes.
This is all well and good when you're going to the rally for your summer vacation, or popping over to visit for the day from Wyoming -- in other words, when the rally itself is your destination, it's an incredible amount of fun and there's no better people watching anywhere. But when you actually live there, you usually come to hate the rally with the fire of a thousand suns. The luckier residents with the free time and money to do so take their own two-week vacation to go pretty much anywhere else to escape the craziness. Most everyone else, though, grits their teeth as they creep along in their car for an hour to get through the city (a journey that would normally take less than five minutes), and just wonders when everyone is going to go the hell home.
So there we were, my husband and I, making our way towards Rapid City one evening, which meant we had to go through Sturgis to get there. Since it was late evening, traffic had slowed to a virtual crawl as was the norm during the actual rally week. Now, realize we weren't actually in town yet -- we were still a good mile or two away at this point. But the road we were on is a huge thoroughfare during the rally (Sturgis and the freeway in one direction, the huge Buffalo Chip concert venue and campground in the other), so it was essentially rush-hour traffic driving. Go a few feet, stop. Go a few feet more, stop. Repeat until death.
We'd passed the big fuel station and the Full Throttle Saloon, and reached a point where there was just a big field to the north of us. As we inched our way along, my husband notices this big, ugly green bus parked just into the field, one of its long sides facing the road. There was a phrase painted on the side in big orange letters.
"What does that say?" he muttered. I darted a glance over at it, but couldn't spare more than a second before I had to look back at the road to avoid running over the motorcycle ahead of me. "Don't know," I said. "I can't look at it long enough."
He looked at it a few more moments. "Tiggle bitties?" he said (or at least that's what it sounded like to me). "It says tiggle bitties. What the hell?" I could hear him whispering the phrase a few times.
"Hmmm. How's it actually spelled?" I asked.
"T-I-G-O-L B-I-T-T-I-E-S," he replied. I pictured the letters in my head... and started to chuckle.
"Oh, now, that's just sad," I said.
"Wait, what? You got it? What does it mean?" he asked, now looking back over his shoulder to still see the lettering on the bus.
"You sure you want me to tell you? You're going to be mad you didn't see it first," I cautioned as I laughed a bit harder. He waved his hands in the universal 'just tell me already' manner.
"Big ol' titties. We are in Sturgis, after all."
He just closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the headrest, and started this low sort of sad groan. "How," he said. "How in the world did that happen? How did my wife get that one before me?"
"I don't know, man," I said. "But if we pass another bus up ahead with Wong Leiner on the side, I'm sure you'll figure it out first..."
This is my entry for the first week of Season 9 of therealljidol. The prompt this week was 'jayus', meaning a corny or lame joke that is so bad, you have to laugh at it. Even though we moved from SD almost 5 years ago now, this was still the memory that popped into my brain at reading the topic. ;)
As always, thanks for reading. If you enjoyed it, feel free to toss me a vote (and anyone else you find worthy) over here at the poll. :)