When a teen spends 30 seconds planning a vacation

Here is what happens when you ask a teen to take maybe one hour out of his busy summer schedule of all-day texting and online gaming to plan a couple of family roadtrips. Gawd, an entire hour?! Parents suck, don’t we! Well, I know one teen who was gonna show us that he could do that hour’s worth of research in TEN minutes!

I exaggerate… a little. Jamie’s list had enough places on it to do several roadtrips, which was the assignment, but was, shall we say, short on details. It was the equivalent of “How was your day?” “Fine.” “What did you do in school?” “Nothing.” but we are trying to do all of the “fine” and “nothing” anyway.

Today’s “fine/nothing” was Waco. He had heard that something called Magnolia Market was cool, with food trucks and stuff. When I briefly googled it, I learned that it is some kind of highly curated shopping complex owned by some reality tv stars, focused on home decor.

Now, shopping and home decor are definitely not an interest of his, so it was pretty obvious to me that he hadn’t put much effort into his research. But the point of this whole experiment was getting him to do a grown-up thing and letting him experience any consequences that fell out of that, for better or for worse. So we didn’t say anything like “It might not be what you think it is” or “You’re not going to like it.” We just went.

(To be fair, if any of his half-assed research would have cost us substantial money to do something that we knew was not going to be worth it, we would have intervened and asked him to look into it more. But the things he chose were low-stakes — Magnolia Market is free to wander through.)

I took no photos at Magnolia Market because it just wasn’t that interesting to me (a dozen shops that all were nearly identical in style and vibe… two larger home decoration and furniture stores… a bunch of food trucks and coffee stands… a pickleball court and a “town square”). Jamie did notice that one of the larger stores smelled nice. He said “It’s a very specific smell that sometimes home decor stores have, that I just really like.” So I am glad he had that nice experience. I don’t think he hated the place, and I think he was interested to see what it was, and he learned that it wasn’t very interesting.

We also went to the Dr Pepper Museum, because there is truly just not that much else to do in Waco. I’m not really that fond of Dr Pepper, but the museum was more like a history of the carbonated drink industry in general. And our admission ticket included a freshly made Dr Pepper (or IBC root beer!) at the soda fountain. It was so damn hot, and that was very refreshing at the end.