If you spend any time around my family, you will eventually hear a strange term. When things are going severely wrong, when a situation is just awful, someone in the family will mutter, Wampatucked.
My girls blog for their English assignments. Today, one of them posted this. This is the source of the Thomas family phrase.
A true account of one of our family adventures
Everything was going smoothly. Mom had all that we needed for S’mores and a great camp supper.
Dad bought firewood from the camp hosts. (We never buy firewood. We normally find it. This was a rare occasion.)
Fortunately we found the perfect campsite near the bath house. As I said everything was going smoothly.
Just as Dad and my brother began to set up the tent, it started raining.
Not your typical rain-for-five-minutes-then-stop-raining, but a terrible squall.
We tumbled into the van to wait out the storm. It was pouring buckets. You couldn’t see anything outside the windows.
Apparently we weren’t going to succeed in just waiting out the storm, because the van was leaking……a lot.
In the back of the van, rain was seeping in on all sides.
We held up towels and blankets to the leaks, but plenty of water got in anyway.
Dad decided we should leave the campground and park under an overhang to avoid any more leaks.
As we drove, nothing seemed familiar in the storm.
Slowly the trees on all sides began to close in and the road grew narrower.
I could barely make out a dead end sign at the side of the road.
I was praying the whole time that we would make it out.
We spent a long time backing up and finding the way out, but we finally managed to leave Wampatuck state park.
The rain was not letting up, and there was nothing anywhere to serve as a shelter from the storm.
At least 45 minutes later Dad spotted an abandoned gas station.
We huddled next to the old pumps and ate cereal for dinner.
Just our luck, there happened to be a police officer nearby. He came over to ask us what we were doing. A family of seven eating cereal at an abandoned gas station kinda qualifies as suspicious activity.
We informed him of our situation and he left us alone.
Finally the storm ceased and we spent an uncomfortable night sleeping in our cramped, musty van.
The next morning we discovered that someone had stolen our firewood and our campsite was soaked.
Many months later we received a check from Wampatuck, Massachusetts refunding our money.
