I begin a long vacation tomorrow, and I’m thankful. For weeks, work has been an exhausting, stressful, thankless grind. Dash it all, I am so, so thankful for a long break.

While musing upon vacations I had as a kid in Ecuador, I recently recalled That Time My Vacation Held Me Prisoner: an adventure equally restful and stressful, when my family and I were prevented from going home by barricades of burning tires. Ah, Ecuador, why did I ever leave you?

Ecuador: land of dazzling natural beauty, diverse cultures, superb cuisine… and horrible, horrible cockroaches. I knew I had a reason for leaving.

In the jungles of Ecuador, east of the Andes, there is a little town called Shell Mera. (This tiny settlement made national news in the fifties due to the Auca incident, in which five missionaries were killed.) Near Shell Mera is a camp called Mangayacu. This motley collection of cabins, pastures, and the world’s best swimming pool was one of my family’s favorite vacation spots until we left Ecuador in 2008.

Seriously, this pool is awesome: no chlorine, no life guards, and the exciting possibility of cutting open your feet on sharp rocks!

My family and I were once stranded in Mangayacu. This was a long time ago; I was somewhere between first and fourth grade, which would put this adventure in the late nineties. I’d nearly forgotten it; I’m very gifted at forgetting things.

My parents and brothers and I had finished our visit to Mangayacu and reluctantly packed up our things. After saying goodbye to our cabin, we took off in our dusty car and bumped along dirt roads in the direction of the town of Baños. (Yes, this happens to be Spanish for bathrooms. The word also means baths; the town is named after its hot springs.)

We were stopped by piles of burning tires. It was a paro (workers’ strike) shutting down the road. My dad got out of the car and pleaded our case to the strikers. They didn’t let us pass.

Back we went to the cabin we’d just left, delighted to enjoy a longer vacation, and apprehensive at how our vacation suddenly held us prisoner.

I suppose there are worse prisons than the cabins at Mangayacu. At least the view is nice!

I don’t remember how many extra days we stayed at Mangayacu, but it was at least two or three. We scoured one or two tiny local shops for necessities like bread, and had a few meals at a local restaurant. I recall their stock running low because of the paro. As fun as it was at first to be stranded in a cozy jungle cabin, we felt more stressed with each new day. We wanted to go home!

At last, after my brother and I had missed at least a couple of school days, we made it safely back to our home in Santo Domingo de los Colorados. My older brother returned to Quito for school, and I resumed my studies at home.

Later visits to Mangayacu were undisturbed by paros and flaming tires. It was kind of fun to be held prisoner by our vacation, but I’m thankful it never happened again.

Every time I’m afraid I’ve run out of stories for these That Time I _____ posts, a memory of some odd adventure drifts back to me from the brightly-colored blur of the past twenty-something years. It’s surreal, and sweetly nostalgic. It makes me wonder what else I’ve forgotten.

Ah, well. It doesn’t matter. My latest vacation begins tomorrow, and I can’t wait. Here’s hoping this one doesn’t take me prisoner!

High school was a strange chapter of my life. I moved repeatedly, attended schools on separate continents, became a writer, discovered my love of coffee and broke down on the Ecuadorian coast in the rain at night in an area infested with bandits. Good times, good times.

Some of my best high school memories come from the Alliance Academy International in Quito, the capital of Ecuador. The school offered an excellent education, and its faculty consisted largely of lunatics. It was at this school that I became the father of a small, rotund, green-skinned child. His mother and I named him Hakkatan Melchizedek Stück.

He had his father’s, um… dish towel.

My egg-shaped offspring was the result of a project in my senior year in which students were put in pairs, given watermelons and required to spend a week nurturing them as loving parents. This was meant to teach us all about parenting. I’m not sure exactly how that was supposed to work, except that babies and watermelons are both kind of heavy and don’t respond well to being dropped.

My wife for the project, whom I’ll call Socrates, wanted to name our child Hakkatan. I wanted to name him Melchizedek. In the end, in the spirit of matrimonial harmony, we compromised and gave him both names. Our classmates gave their children boring names, except for one young gentleman who called his melon Triton Quincy McFarland.

Hakkatan was a quiet, cheerful child. He never cried, always grinned and gave his parents hardly any trouble.

Of course, the same wasn’t true of all my classmates’ kids. At least one watermelon met a grim end when his parents abandoned him in a dorm room for several hours. According to the story I heard, they returned to find half the melon smashed on the floor, the other half stuck full of knives and a note that read NEVER LEAVE YOUR CHILD ALONE.

Some of my classmates really got into parenting their melons, dressing them up in baby clothes and wheeling them everywhere in strollers. I don’t recall how Socrates and I handled Hakkatan; we may have carried him around in a basket, but I don’t really remember. There is one thing I remember clearly: how Hakkatan met his end.

You see, the parenting project lasted only a week. Hakkatan was my child for seven days. After that, he was merely a watermelon. Some of my classmates celebrated the end of the project by eating their melons. That seemed a bit morbid, so I settled for chopping up Hakkatan with a machete and disposing of his body in a trash bag.

Socrates and I each received a good grade for the project, after which we dissolved our week-long marriage. She and I remained on good terms until our graduation from the Alliance Academy International; I haven’t seen her since. As for Hakkatan, well, his rounded figure and beaming face nearly faded from my memory. It was only as I browsed old photos recently that I stumbled upon the picture above: my child, smiling at me from across the years, neither bitter nor resentful at his violent demise.

Requiescat in pace, my son. Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!