Underwear Pair #1 Donned

    Anthony, Joe and I left my house just around 9 a.m. Anthony drove us first through Queens, where he had to return his rented tuxedo (for those who don’t know, we had come from our friend Ari’s wedding the previous night). Nothing much of note happened. Anthony kept driving us north on 95 and we stopped at a rest area for food ‘round lunchtime. The driving continued and we dreaded once again having to go through Connecticut, as we had in the previous month. You see, Connecticut has absolutely no good radio stations. The music, the DJs, everything, it’s horrible, and we didn’t prepare a set of CDs to take with us. We simply had to make do with what Anthony had in the car at the time.

    When we stopped at a rest stop again later in the day for another meal, we switched and I drove for the last 5 hours or so. It didn’t quite work for me since, in the first half of the day, I had the sun shining on me. We were driving north, the sun was in the east, I was in the passenger-side seat. And, of course, now that we had switched, it was later in the day, the sun was in the west – meaning it was bearing down on me again that I was now in the driver-side seat. (Little did I know that I would learn the true nature of “heat” in the coming weeks.)

    After driving through a dainty little town at 7:30 p.m. and entering Baxter State Park, we drove through some gravel roadways to arrive at Katahdin Stream Campground. Just before we got to the actual campground, we encountered something in the road. I wasn’t quite sure what it was at first – it was too thin to be a person. I thought it might be a tree of some sort, but, in the middle of the road? As the creature turned, it was then that I realized it was a moose. We weren’t able to get a picture of it in time before it fled off into the woods, but Anthony, being thrilled enough at being among so many trees, was very content with that encounter. At our lean-to at the campground, Joe and I unloaded our gear, then thanked Anthony for coming all the way up despite everyone else bailing out on the roadtrip. I asked one last favor of him, to call my mom once he got back out, as cell phone use was prohibited in the park (why? I’m not sure), and then we said goodbye. Joe and I set up for the evening, including stringing up our bear bags, and turned in to sleep in our lean-to despite the somewhat annoying bugs around (black flies and mosquitoes of course). I found that falling asleep next to a stream was nice.

Joe: Oh, by the way Gene, I play the Katahdin card. It forces you to carry my gear up and down the mountain.

Gene: Ah ha, but you see, I not only anticipated you playing that card, I was counting on it.

For you see I had put a trap card face down: Deflect Magic. It relays any magic effect back at you.

Joe: Not so fast. I expected you'd do that, so I now play...

Yu-Gi-Oh ain't got nothin' on us.