A pretty uneventful ride, and short; we're at the point in our tour
where when we talk about a ride of this length we preface the distance
with an "only," as in "only 52 miles," and where the night before we
discuss pushing the breakfast hour back, and sleeping in a little,
because the ride is so short.
What was most interesting to me about the ride was the change in
terrain/scenery between the first and second halves. The first part of
the ride, once we got past the town of New Meadows, reminded me a lot
of northern Minnesota, with just a little more mountain in the
background -- we were on a twisty, up and down road through beautiful
pine forest and alongside a pristine river. (Dawn said she had the
same thought.) The second half, after a not-too-steep climb over a
ridge (and a *great* several-miles-long descent into the town of
Council(*)) was unforested, semi-arid range land.
The rest of the ride, about 20 more miles into Cambridge (pop 360),
was pleasant enough, but pretty unremarkable. We camped in the back
yard of the Frontier Motel and RV Park, which was notable mostly for
the yapper-crapper dog (one of three!) belonging to our RV-residing
neighbor. When unleashed this dog roamed freely throughout our tent
area, demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had a healthy,
working digestive system. The young boy of the family was outside
maintaining dog B or C on a leash, so I approached him and asked him
to please clean up after dog A, which he promptly did. This led to his
(i.e., dog A's) being tethered [good!] when the family was around, or,
when they weren't, to being confined, alone, inside the RV, where he
(?) barked constantly [not so good]. An upside: Robin was able to
confirm, multiple times, that his dog zapper was still functional.
After dinner Hugh gave me the international signal for "you wanna go
get some ice cream?"(**) In return I signalled "you're on, dude"(***).
We did a little research to find a venue ("the" Cambridge venue, in
fact), and I went back to tent city to see whether anyone else was
interested. Virtually EVERYone was interested, it turned out, so a
group of 10 headed over to Mrs G's Restaurant for some SPPP
(supplemental post-pudding pudding).
Mrs G turned out to have not just ice cream, but an array of pie
options for use as an ice cream underpinning. Nice. Many in the group
switched gears and went that route, me included. (Walnut; interesting;
good; but not as good as a good quality pecan, such as my own, for
instance.) Others stayed the cone or bowl course. Alas, in addition to
pie, Mrs G also had possibly the worst service of any restaurant I've
been to in a long time -- cheerful, friendly, but incredibly,
unbelievably, astoundingly S......L......O......W. The most
complicated item we ordered was pie with ice cream, unless you think
that an ice cream cone is more complicated than that. No, wait --
Jerry ordered a root beer float. Anyway, you get the picture: these
were not dishes which required consulting a recipe. Pretty much
everyone in the restaurant biz has to know that you put the ice cream
IN the cone and deliver it cone-side down. Our group's order took
about 30 minutes to be delivered, piece by painfully slow piece.
Service was so slow and sporadic that Jerry ordered another root beer
float, just so he'd have something to do while waiting for others to
finish up. Of course the float was delivered well before some people
had their initial cone order. Why was Jerry able to get a second float
before Robin got his huckleberry cone?, someone asked. The vanilla is
just a lot easier to scoop, was the answer. Of course! That explains
it! Eventually we all got fed -- before Jerry had to order a third
float, thank goodness -- and we all waddled back to camp.
But the REAL excitement occurred way back at Zims, in the wee hours of
the morning, long before the ride or any of the other adventures of
the day. When 9:00 rolled around -- 9:30, tops -- and we'd all retired
for the night, the sky was perfectly clear, so clear that the more
brash among us had pondered aloud [OMINOUS EVENT #1] whether to just
sleep out under the stars, or at any rate to not bother deploying
their tent's rain fly. The gods punish such hubris, so naturally at
about 2 a.m. [OMINOUS EVENT #2] I awoke to the definite sound of
thunder. And [OMINOUS EVENT #3] the sound of cows, mooing. At 2 in the
morning, people! That can't mean anything good. I poked my head out of
the tent and saw [OE #4] a greenish sky filled with roiling [that's a
word, right?] and rolling clouds, even though [OE #5] there wasn't any
wind, and saw [OE #6] the sky to the east repeatedly lit with
lightning, and heard rumbles of thunder. And the mooing of cows. And
not just ordinary mooing; I was sure I could detect [OE #7] a clear
note of anguish in those moos. You know how animals supposedly behave
oddly just before an earthquake or a volcanic eruption? Well I figured
that the same sort of thing was happening with the cows. They *knew,*
with their keen bovine acumen and perceptiveness, that this wasn't
just any old rainstorm that was brewing, but rather a killer
thunderstorm of biblical proportions.
Side note, possibly obvious by this point: when it comes to being in a
tent in bad weather I am a world-class wimp. I hate it. The fact that
there are people who can actually sleep through a storm while camping
out is amazing to me. Sleep?!? When death is imminent?!? I don't think
so. One manifestation of this wimpitude is a tendency for even small
indications of weather trouble to stimulate in me a healthy dose of
paranoia. And what we had here was anything but "small indications" --
nosiree bob. We had thunder! We had lightning! We had strange skies!
We had no wind whatsoever! We had cows mooing their anguished warnings
of IMPENDING DOOM AND DESTRUCTION!!!!!!
I took immediate and decisive action, of the type you would expect
from a groggily semi-asleep and delusional-with-terror individual: (1)
It wasn't raining yet, so I went out to the latrine and peed. Duh --
one doesn't want to meet one's maker with a full bladder. (2a) I got
dressed, in case I needed to make a run for it ["it"=?????], including
(2b) the application of deodorant, because that's what you do when you
get dressed. (3) I let the air out of my thermarests. I can't recreate
my logic here. Possibly this was so I could more quickly grab them and
go, if necessary. But why would I want to grab them? And where was I
going to go? Unclear. Also, it should be noted that when you're lying
on a thermarest, deflation takes about a millisecond, so taking this
completely unnecessary precaution in advance wasn't really buying me a
lot of extra time. (4) I grabbed a flashlight, put it in a secure
location, and then promptly forgot where I put it. (5) I located
another flashlight. (6) I found the first flashlight by stepping on
it. There! Now I was fully prepared. And just in time, because here
comes the rain...
...Very, very gently, for about.... oh, maybe 2 minutes max, the
barest of sprinkles. After a while I became convinced that I might
survive the night, so I put away the flashlights, and reinserted my
clothed, sweet-smelling, empty-bladdered body into my sleeping bag
(now free of that pesky cushion of air between me and the hard
ground), and went to sleep. The morning dawned completely clear, and,
miraculously, everyone else had survived, too.
----------
(*) Site of a coffee and muffin stop at an excellent coffee shop
featuring an attractive display of black-and-white portraits,
photographs, of some of Council's finest citizens. Very interesting
studies of some of the faces. Included in the array were two people in
the shop -- the young woman behind the counter, and a guy sitting back
in the corner doing some e-work on the available-to-the-public computer.
(**) Spooning-into-the-mouth motion with one hand, from the other hand
formed into the shape of a bowl, while simultaneously saying, "You
wanna go get some ice cream?"
(***) [Sorry; this signal is proprietary, and I am not at liberty to
reveal it.]
(Sent from my iPhone)
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