We drove home overnight from a short camping trip to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Taos on notice that our goat had given birth while we were gone. (rolleyes) Really?! How do they know when the absolutely most inconvenient time will be?
Anyway, in an effort to keep vacation alive and kicking for at least a few more minutes, here is a list of some wonderful, wacky, and odd things I learned on this trip. (Please remember I’m Scottish and have a hard core bent for sarcasm.)
1. Despite a babbling mountain stream and chirping birds filling a serene canyon with peaceful, meditative sounds, playing music as loud as possible is a MUST-HAVE for camping out.
2. Sage brush tangled in a barbed-wire fence in the dead of night looks suspiciously like a deer ready to bound into traffic.
3. The Rio Grande is a big river in New Mexico and has formed a gorge that is fun to explore, or at least drag your dog un-willlingly to the rim.
4. If you walk through a spa to check it out in your street clothes, everyone stares wildly.
5. Anyone parked on a forest road in a beat up car at one in the morning terrifies me.
6. People with a chain saw can make good money in a national forest.
7. A bottle of soda at a ski resort in the summer months costs more than a McDonald’s hamburger.
8. Eighteen year old girls are just as bitchy in the wilderness as they are at home.
9. Flies beside a babbling mountain stream smash without taking flight.
10. The mini-van battery will fail if the doors are left open and someone plays the WiiU for two minutes.
11. Being two miles down a dirt pot-hole filled road in the middle of a national forest when your car battery dies sucks.
12. Even if I move my chair two hundred yards from the fire pit, the smoke will still engulf me.
13. Driving hairpin ‘S’ curves back-to-back at twenty miles per hour after dark in the mountains is almost as bad as driving a flat straight road at seventy miles per hour across the Oklahoma panhandle.
14. Farm animals birth their young while everyone is gone.
15. Wal-Mart is not universally the “same”.
16. The degree by which an item is necessary for a successful camp-out is directly proportional to what remains at home on the dining room table.
17. The shadow from a cloud can look like a dragon climbing over a mountain top or a pterodactyl attacking a T. Rex.
18. Despite amazing and yummy looking pictures on the internet, cooking a hot dog wrapped in biscuit dough on a stick over a fire results in a gooey mass of half-baked dough falling into the fire with the hot dog still cold.
19. Cats left behind will search their owners belongings at will … and leave behind presents in the most unusual places.
20. Four-wheelers top the list of camping essentials. Apparently.
wingedwriting 