Oui Oui Monsieur, Pack Underpants. Soon Our Hick Will Fly to France.

It looks like Hick will be going to France.

You know, because a man such as he is in great demand across the pond. We are fretting because it couldn't come at a busier time. The Pony has a special award (NOT a leg lamp, I swear!) dinner next Sunday that is a considerable distance away from Backroads. Hick thinks he will probably have to fly out that afternoon, because, as a world traveler, he says they usually don't book international flights that leave at night. So we might have to find a way to get him to the airport in a hurry.

At least he will make the dinner this week at The Pony's school, where The Pony's valedictorianship will be officially announced, and he (The Pony, of course, not Hick) will get a plaque for MVP for his scholar bowl team. However, if the trip is the following week as he imagines, Hick will miss the sectional scholar bowl tournament, a berth which the team just earned last night at districts. Oh, and Hick will miss prom. Not that he's going. Or that he even needs to drive The Pony and his date this year. It's just that he enjoys taking pictures and seeing The Pony prancing around in his finery.

For those of you going, "Hmm...maybe Hick really IS a spy!" Let the record show that he has made other international trips for work. Wales. Germany. Brazil. New Jersey. Oops! That last one slipped in there because such a place is as foreign to Hick as the others. But he DID get a free lawnmower there when they packed up a plant that was closing. I'm assuming he had permission. Not like that fly-by-night drainage pipe that appeared on the back of his trailer.

Hick never really mentioned WHY he might be going to France. Lest he be applying for a pharmaceutical delivery position from an unmarked storefront in France, I thought I should get some more details by text while he was riding the bus to the district tournament with The Pony's scholar bowl team. Some delivery driver he'll make! Can't even drive himself a couple of counties to a Missouri Mississippi River town.

"Why are you going to France?"

"To get machines we bought"

"Do you have to ride them like a raft across the ocean?"

"No I put them in containers like I have in the field"

"No free lawnmower for you."

"No"

So, I assume he means he will be dismantling some working machines and packing them in a freight container and then flying back while that container takes a slow boat to Missouri. I'm pretty sure a freight container is not coming back on a plane. And I'm pretty sure Hick's workplace won't want Hick on a slow boat back to Missouri. He doesn't elaborate much, our Hick. WHICH COULD BE A PART OF HIS COVER FOR HIS SECRET AGENT PERSONA!

I want to tell Hick to buy himself a black-and-white Frenchy-looking mime shirt while he's there. And a beret. To sit in a cafe and eat a baguette. Hand someone his cell phone and ask them to take a picture while he smiles and says, "Frommage."

Maybe I need to reconsider that cell phone picture. Wouldn't want him to end up cell-phoneless, like Clark W. Griswold lost his camera in National Lampoon's European Vacation.

I should also warn him not to toss his beret off the top of the Eiffel Tower. Especially if there's a lady standing next to him with a little dog.