"Maybe it's a woodpecker."
“Maybe it’s a woodpecker,” Rapunzel suggested.
Carl got to his feet and shuffled the door. He got the shock of his life when he opened it and saw Russell, the young Wilderness Explorer from the day before, standing on his porch. “Hi, Mr Frederickson!” the boy called.
“What are you doing out here, kid?” Carl exclaimed.
“I found the snipe, and I followed it under your porch. But this snipe had a tail and looked more like a large mouse.” He grinned hopefully at Carl. “Please let me in.”
“No,” Carl replied, shortly, closing the door. He hesitated and then opened it again. “Oh, alright, you can come...”
Russell hurried past him and into the house, looking harassed. “In,” Carl finished, closing the door.
Russell looked around the house, dropped his rucksack and wandered into the living room. “I’ve never been in a floating house before,” he said.
Rapunzel, who had grabbed a frying pan in case it was a bird that needed to be scared away, looked up at him. “Hi, who are you?”
“I’m Russell; I’m a Wilderness Explorer.”
“Oh, well hi, I’m Rapunzel. How’d you get all the way up here?”
“I followed a snipe under the porch.”
“Oh, I see.”
Russell chuckled, pointing to the picture of Ellie as a child that sat on the mantelpiece. “Goggles.” He looked around. “Are you guys going on a trip?”
“Something like that, yeah,” Rapunzel replied. “We’re going to Paradise Falls.”
“South America? Most people take a plane but you’re smart because you’ll have your TV and clocks and stuff.” Russell ran over to the steering mechanism. “Whoa! Is this how you steer it?”
“Don’t touch it!” Carl exclaimed.
But Russell was already trying to steer. “Oh, this way’s left and this way’s right.”
“Careful,” Rapunzel said, patiently stopping his hands from moving it anymore.
“Cool!” Russell looked down. “I can see my house from here!”
Carl turned and shuffled away to the fireplace. “Spent all night blowing up these balloons...”he muttered, kneeling down to cut a few strings.
“I know that cloud.” Russell pointed. “It’s a Cumulo Nimbus.”
Rapunzel tried to remember what she had been taught about cloud formations in school. “Whoa, looks like it’s getting a little stormy over there,” she said, doubtfully as a black cloud approached and then a clap of lightening lit up the whole room. Instinctively she and Russell both grabbed one another.
“What are you two doing over there?” asked Carl, turning to face them.
“Look!” Russell pointed to the storm. “See. Cumulo Nimbus.”
“We’re going to get sucked in!” Rapunzel cried, and Carl attempted to steer the house away from the storm, but it was no good, they were pulled in. The thunder and lightning knocked them all off their feet. Plates slid from the walls and Rapunzel just managed to catch the clock as it fell a second later. Russell leapt on top of his backpack and was almost propelled out of the front door as it swung open, only to be saved when it shut again in the nick of time. Carl grabbed everything valuable that fell and was knocked into his chair. “Daddy!” Rapunzel cried, seizing hold of her mother’s chair as the storm raged on. Her hands were too full to do anything about steering. “Russell, do something!”
“Right!” Russell grabbed the steering mechanism. “Which way do I go?”
“It doesn’t matter! Just get us out of here!”
Rapunzel wasn’t quite sure how it happened in the end; only that there was a lot of screaming and panicking involved – mainly Russell’s – but somehow they pulled through the storm alright and the house was still. With a sigh of relief, she dropped everything into her mother’s chair and patted her father. “Daddy! Daddy!”
Carl opened his eyes. “What happened?”
“I steered us!” Russell exclaimed, proudly. “I did! I steered the house!”
“He got us out of the storm,” Rapunzel explained.
Carl got up, opened the window and popped his head out. All he could see was white cloud. “Can’t tell where we are,” he said.
“Oh, we’re in South America, alright,” Russell said.
“How can you tell?” Rapunzel asked.
“With my Wilderness Explorer GPS.” Russell displayed it, proudly. “My dad gave it to me. It shows exactly where we are on the planet. With this baby, we’ll never be lost!” However, alas for Russell, he waved his hand at that moment and dropped the thing out the window. “Oops.”
Rapunzel smiled. “Well, if we’re here, then shouldn’t we touch down?”
Carl nodded and cut some strings. The house descended. “We’ll find a bus stop and you just tell the driver that you want to go back to your mom.”
“Sure, but I don’t think they have buses in Paradise Falls,” Russell muttered.
“Paradise Falls!” Rapunzel exclaimed. “So, we’re there!”
“We can’t be there yet,” grunted Carl, disbelievingly. They went to the porch and observed the fog around them. “We can’t be that close to the ground yet,” Carl said, as something that looked like a tall building passed them.
WHAM! The house hit the ground so hard that the three of them were flung off the porch and into a heap on the ground. The house began to float away again. “Wait wait! Oh, no, don’t, don’t, don’t!” Carl cried, snatching the unravelled garden hose. But his weight wasn’t enough to keep the house on the ground.
“Daddy!” cried Rapunzel, grabbing at his legs, but she was dragged along the ground too. It took Russell’s added weight to keep them grounded.
“Where are we?” Rapunzel asked, looking around.
“This doesn’t look anything like the city of the jungle,” Russell observed as the mist cleared.
“Daddy, is that-?”
“Paradise Falls!” Carl looked at the picture from Ellie’s book. “We made it!”
“Oh, Mom would be so proud!” Rapunzel squealed, wiping away a tear.
“Russell, climb up to the house,” Carl said.
Russell tried to do so, but it turned out he wasn’t very good at climbing. “Hey, if I could assist you guys over there, would you sign off my badge?”
“Badge?” Rapunzel repeated.
“For Assisting the Elderly. It’s the only one I don’t have.”
“What are you getting at, kid?” asked Carl.
“We could walk your house over to the falls. Like a parade balloon.”
So, that was what they did. Russell tied a rope harness from his rucksack to the hose and Rapunzel tied an old tree vine that looked sturdy enough not to break to Russell’s rope, and then the three of them harnessed themselves to the house and began to walk it along towards the waterfall. “Now, we're gonna walk to the falls quickly and quietly, with no rap music or flash-dancing,” Carl told them, looking at Russell in particular. “We have three days, at best, before the helium leaks out of those balloons. And if we're not at the falls when that happens, we're not getting to the falls!”
“Don’t worry, Mom,” Rapunzel murmured, looking up at the sky. “We’ll get the house there.”
However, what seemed to be an easy task at first glance soon turned out to be rather tiresome. Russell was soon worn out after the first fifteen minutes. “I’m tired,” he groaned. “And my knee hurts.”
“Which one?” asked Rapunzel.
Russell didn’t seem to know, so he went on “My elbow hurts and I have to go to the bathroom.”
“I asked you that about five minutes ago!” Carl exclaimed.
“Well, I didn’t have to go then,” Russell moaned, flopping down on the ground.
Rapunzel couldn’t help laughing.
“Russell, if you don’t hurry up, the tigers will get you,” Carl tried.
“There are no tigers in South America!” Russell pointed to one of his badges. “Zoology!”
“Daddy, maybe we should take a rest stop,” Rapunzel suggested.
“Don’t tell me you need to go too,” he sighed.
“No, but I need to empty the sand out of my shoe.”
Carl sighed. “Ok, go into the bushes and do your business.”
“Ok!” cried Russell, suddenly perky. “Here, hold my stuff!”
He handed his pack to Carl, threw his harness around the branch of a tree and scurried into the bushes. “I’ve always wanted to try this,” he muttered, holding up a small shovel and a pile of leaves. “Um, Mr Frederickson, am I supposed to dig the hole before or after?”
“None of my concern!” Carl groaned.
“Oh! It’s before!”
Carl covered his ears. Rapunzel shook sand from her shoe and laughed. “Oh, Daddy! He’s really quite cute for a pain in the backside!”
“I’ve never been in a floating house before,”
“We made it!”
"He’s really quite cute for a pain in the backside!”
