July 16, 2006

I was much warmer and slept better last night. We borrowed a sleeping bag from someone that had extras. I woke up once to find the sleeping bag on the floor. I thought Ax woke up at the same time as I did, but he seems to remember me waking him up to ask if he was cold. Since he was, now that he was awake, he said yes and I put the sleeping bag back on the bed.

We got up pretty early. Apparently Mickey and Shannon got up at "O’Dark thirty" to do some fishing and Maria was up too, longing for a clean bathroom and shower. I can certainly sympathize, latrines give me the creeps. I haven’t made up my mind what is better, bringing a high-powered light to be sure nothing and no one is down that hole (YUK!) or to keep myself in the dark and pretend that it’s just a regular toilet. (That takes a lot of my imagination.) Neither option is very appealing.

After the sun began to clear off the mist over the lake, a few geese swam by close to shore and seemed to think we were easy marks for food. They were right; we had a few extra hot dog buns. Maria threw out some pieces to the four geese. Shortly, she told the rest of us that one goose was an idiot. We started watching it making imaginative suggestions about its odd behavior.

This particular goose didn’t seem to care about getting some free food but since its companions stopped it seemed to want to dance or the goose equivalent. It was just swimming in circles, a few times actually eating a piece of the bread it twirled into. One suggestion was that it was blind another that it had only one leg another that he was just a queer goose. I’d agree with the third suggestion, it was a weird goose. After the bread was gone the three got into formation and started to swim to the next campsite. The weird one just kept making pirouettes and ignored the others. The others stopped and waited for quite a while doing things to look busy like cleaning themselves, stretching and getting food from the lake floor. After they tired of this one of the three went back to fetch the weird one. It didn’t work and eventually they all came back in our direction to the campsite on our other side. People were now awake over there and ready to feed some geese. The weird one just kept up his dance.

We ate breakfast, packed up the tent and car and played some more cards. After lunch we said our good-byes and started our drive home. I managed to get one picture of Mount Hood on our way out of the forest. (Ax: Yeah, we got a nice pic of Mt. Hood, but we missed the 4 beautifully restored 1964 Shelby Cobras that we saw 20 minutes after leving camp! They were soooo pretty!)

It seemed like a much longer drive home than the drive Friday night. We got home before dark, which isn’t hard in Boise in the summer. (I think the sun sets around 10pm.) I had a really good time and I like Ax’s family. (For the record, my family liked Brenda, too. {Well sure...I mean what's not to like?! })