We try to teach our children to protect themselves.  Parents have unwritten rules about all sorts of bad things, and we pound them into our children’s thick skulls at every opportunity.

We attempt to make our points clear by scaring some sense into them:

Don’t swim right after you eat.  You could cramp up and drown.

Don’t run with scissors in your hands.  You could poke your eye out.

Don’t talk to strangers.  They might kidnap you.

Don’t give money to strangers.  You’ll never see it again.

So, tell me, why do we adults forget many of these basic rules when we’re on vacation?

We went to New Braunfels recently to float the river.  We gave a lot of money to a strange man.  This man was grungy and smelly, and we would have knocked our kids up side the head if we had ever caught them talking with him at any other place.  He gave us some tubes to float down the river, and this strange man promised to pick us up at the end.

Yeah, right.  This is what horror movies are made of.  In the movies he never comes and the family trudges through the forest trying to make their way home, only to be eaten alive by alligators and other monsters.  Well, our guy picked us up after all, but not until we all but convinced ourselves he wouldn’t be there.

But the best story is about last weekend in San Antonio.  Half of our town was there for a big high school football game, and we ended up doing a lot of the same tourist things.

Word was going around about a “ghost tour”.  The literature said the group began at the Alamo and ended at the historic Menger Hotel.  We envisioned tiptoeing through dark halls with flashlights, and perhaps even being scared silly when the curtains moved or something.

Even if you don’t believe in ghosts, it sounded like fun.

The instructions went something like this: “Meet the man with the blue backpack in front of the Alamo at 10:30 p.m.  Give him your money.  Cash only.  Follow him into the darkness.”

Now, I might have felt a bit foolish if I were alone on this tour, but there were dozens from our town there.  (I won’t name names.)  We all showed up, gave this stranger our cash and waited for him to take us down the dark alley.

We broke so many of our own rules, I am ashamed.  But, like I said, we weren’t alone, so I thought it would be okay.

Well, the bad ending to this story is not that we got mugged or shot and killed.  No, not that.

We got taken.  We walked around the brightly lit streets as he carried on about the history of the Alamo with an amateurish comedic twist.  (He thought he was really funny, and he wasn’t.)  The closest we got to ghosts was when he pointed to windows of old buildings and said there had been ghost activity there. 

We didn’t walk through the Alamo.  We didn’t walk through the Menger.  Heck, we didn’t even walk down a dark alley.  We had been prepared to get all scared and scream and stuff, and our hearts weren’t even beating fast.  Getting mugged was sounding pretty fun.

Well, we got what was coming, I guess.  We wanted to see some ghosts, and now we can open our wallets and see the spirit of what used to be dollars there. 

And the man is laughing all the way to the bank.