Random Word Generated Fridays

Randomly Generated Word that inspired today's post: Dinner

I've decided to try to do something for 30 days in a row. Unfortunately for mom, I was talking to my brother about it first so it will not be making my bed. Instead, I'm going to try posting in my blog for 30 days in a row. Since I don't do anything really interesting every day, I thought I'd introduce some theme posts for certain days of the week. Friday posts I thought I would use a random work generator to inspire a post.

"Dinner" luckily gave me an idea for a post that will span today and tomorrow.

It all started one summer when I got it into my head that I was going to go live in California with my aunt & uncle for a few months. To this day I am not entirely sure what brought this on, but it was simple something I was going to do. Period. No matter how many horrible things happened in my life surrounding the trip that even someone who doesn’t believe in “signs” would start questioning the intelligence of their decision.

I'm like a character in a horror movie that way.

The first leg of my journey to CA was down to Pigeon for a family reunion. I had some vague notions of somehow magically transporting myself from Pigeon to Kalamazoo where I had friends who were willing/crazy enough to embark on a week-long road trip with me. There was no real concrete way to do this laid out until my last day in Pigeon when my 1st cousin once removed and her husband offered to let me catch a ride with them to East Lansing and crash at their place for a while until my Kalamazoo connection could pick me up. For those of you who are not up on their family member classifications, it’s my mother’s cousin, which in reality is almost like saying you got a ride with that guy you see maybe twice a year at parties.

However, my first cousin once removed and her husband are awesome people who introduced me to the wonderful and delicious world of specialty brews. They brought me to Dark Horse brewery, where I met up with William, who would bring me to Kalamazoo where we would meet up with Nate and together we would venture to California together.

Just say no kids.

I am not a planner. I am vaguely aware that on a week-long cross-state trip I might want some things like “food” and “maps”. Beyond that though, our collective planning process never got too much further than “get in car and drive from point A to point B.” I did bring along a sleeping bag, where as my buddies did not. This will be an important point later.

And so we piled into Nate’s grandma’s car with no idea what was in store for us.

Cue Ominous Thunder.

We made it from Kalamazoo to Nebraska in our first stretch of the journey, and managed to find a campground to pitch a tent in. Things were going well and we decided it was time to try to make dinner. That’s when the first disaster struck, the camp stove we had brought along worked for maybe 5 minutes before it decided we were unworthy of its heat giving properties. With everything I had planned for meals that week requiring heat to be edible, this was a major wrench in the monkey. We managed to scrape together enough wood to finish cooking the soup and had a nice meal.

That night we went to bed full, happy and warm. Well, I was warm. I brought a sleeping bag. William and Nate’s logic process, on the other hand, went something like “California + Summer = Hot” and so had not brought blankets with them. I would advise you if you are planning a trip along Interstate 80 in the summer to make two additions to your equation “Mountains” and “Deserts at Night are Cold”.

Nate was prepared to tough it out; William decided to try his luck with the emergency blanket in Nate’s car. I don’t know if you’ve ever used an emergency blanket before, but if you so much as even have a nervous eye tick it sounds like a ADD puppy on Pixie Sticks in a room full of cellophane. The other thing about emergency blankets is that they only work if they are sealed against outside air. Anyone who has ever slept before knows that you move in your sleep, thus not only did William sound like a package of Jiffy Pop gone horribly wrong, but he couldn’t stay warm.

Horribly wrong.

Nate’s and my increasing desire to bludgeon William with the useless camp stove was not the biggest danger of the night. We all woke up at about 4:30 Michigan time (the time zone we would remorselessly adhere to for the whole trip) with the ceiling of the tent about a half inch from our faces. It was tornado season in Nebraska.

What followed that discovery was probably the fastest breakdown of a camp in existence. I think we actually managed to move so fast we left before we fully woke up. That is the power of adrenaline friends.

End Part 1