Saturday, May 28, 2011
I survived the New Jersey Hike of Death!
tgp, v, me :: somewhere in the nj wilderness :: may 21, 2011 photo credit: tgp
So, yeah, last weekend. Wow.
I hung around home on Thursday, being so productive it was scary. What a great way to start a 4 day weekend!
No, seriously.
It allowed me to be present Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday morning. Do you know how hard it is to be in the moment when you have a metric shit-ton of stuff to do at the day job and an equally large pile at home?!?! God bless David Allen. That’s all I have to say. Deciding to get back onto the GTD wagon was my best idea ever.
After a SIX HOUR drive to New Jersey (thank you, New York traffic!), and a VERY EVIL call from the Boy Wonder (can I call him the Boy Wonder? He’s been promoted to Bossman. Nah…), I finally arrived at the house of Viz. There was much craziness and much talking. It was like Viz and the M-O-M hadn’t seen a person in days. A little overwhelming, but completely awesome. I needed it, I missed it, I reveled in it.
Saturday, after a completely nummy breakfast (where I had to teach Viz to make scrambled eggs - me, cook! I KNOW!), we headed over to TGP’s for what was supposed to be an easy hike. Remember, between the knee rehab and the subsequent injury to my hips/back, I haven’t really done much of anything even remotely physical. I certainly wasn’t planning on crashing a Boy Scout Jamboree, finding dead snakes and turtles, wading through ankle deep mud and being attacked by ticks. Oh, did I mention we got lost?!?! Mr. Nature Boy got us lost. In the same woods he got himself lost in when he first hiked through them.
Yeah. That proves it - I am NOT a nature girl. I think it was the ticks that pushed me over the edge. I don’t do spiders on a good day, never mind bloodsucking ones. Blech!
The early afternoon ick was definitely overshadowed by the amazing night we had. (I kid. I actually had a blast. Until the ticks.)
It started with Stewart’s Drive In, where I had THE! BEST! ROOT! BEER! FLOAT! IN! THE! HISTORY! OF! FOREVER!!!!! I’m not really a root beer drinker, but root beer + ice cream seemed like the perfect way to get over the horrors of the Hike of Death.
Then, we went and saw Pirates of the Caribbean 4. At a movie theater. It sounds weird, but that was a huge treat for me. We don’t normally go to the movies because we had such terrible experiences in Ohio. I think the last movie we saw was Harry Potter, which wasn’t that long ago, but that’s a MUST. SEE. NOW. kind of movie for us. Anyhoo, we even got movie theater popcorn - another huge treat. I mean, you can’t have the popcorn if you don’t go to the movies, right?
We leave the movie theater and look at each other because we heard a drum corp!!! So then it was the big search to find the drum corp, who were practicing in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Holy bassline disaster. I’ve marched bass drum and it’s hard to see what the other band members are doing if they’re in front of you, so I’ll cut them a little bit of slack, but WOW. They were like bumper cars. I have a spot on the back of my head where D’s drum used to land and it started to hurt as I watched them crash into each other. If they survive the season, it will be a miracle. They were pretty good, even if the metronome was the most annoying thing I’ve ever heard.
We tweeted and facebooked about finding them… Viz was getting texts from her friend W, who had just gotten to the theater and could hear them, too. I love W - we bonded at the Ren Faire last year - so I was excited to maybe have the chance to see him. It turned out his movie was sold out, so we were trying to find out if he wanted to get together. While we were waiting for his response, we sat in front of a loading dock and waiting. No texting and driving for us! Apparently, we picked the perfect spot to set up a game of “Ring Around The Vizma”. Cars that couldn’t find parking spots in that particular lot were turning around in our general area. The couldn’t do the turn anywhere else where there was plenty of room, they had to go around her car.
Eventually, we brought back the “beep!beep!” It just seemed like the right thing to do.
And it was the perfect way to end the weekend.
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