Every day here at the Odyssey, we receive literally two to three emails from our rabid readership. Typically, these emails contain an amusing mixture of insight, advice, and advertisements from "Stop Snoring Now!" clinics. I'm pretty sure Kristanne is shooting me a not-so-subtle hint with those last ones. A recurring theme in this flood tide of correspondence is a pitched cry demanding a return to the Kamping Korner. Lest we run the risk of rebellion and upheaval, we now take you to the Kamping Korner, already in progress.
| Today's topic in the Kamping Korner is exercise. When you're in a particularly hard-charging section of your Odyssey, sometimes it's easy to forget that your body can do things other than stay glued to a bucket seat for hours at a time. Your first clue that something might be wrong comes when you go to get out of the car and your legs can no longer support your weight. They buckle, and you crumple to the ground, openmouthed and astonished. You can witness this phenomenon at truckstops across the nation. The solid "whumps" of atrophied truckers hitting the asphalt as they attempt to get out of their rigs echo grimly through the parking lot. Truckers, being truckers, even have a shorthand phrase for the experience -- it's called "taking the flying-J," named after the shape one's body assumes as it tumbles. In fact, "Flying J" truckstops used to feature as their logo a little stick-figure trucker falling out of an eighteen-wheeler and into a parking lot, right next to a waiting six-pack of easy-drinking Busch Light and some jo-jo potatoes. They've temporarily suspended the use of this logo pending the results of some lawsuits alleging that providing fallen truckers with Busch Light amounts to cruel and unusual behavior. Apparently, they want Budweiser. | |
In any case, as you sit in the parking lot, unable to use your legs, it's not uncommon to have an epiphany along the lines of, "This sucks." It's then that you remember that turning the cruise control on and off as you reach for another of Doc Scholl's Unusual Jerky Treats doesn't exactly constitute an aerobic workout. Kristanne knows this. That's why she's developed a rigorous regimen of multitasked exercises for the modern traveller. These exercises have been carefully designed so that they can be done in tandem with other daily activities, thereby not adding any extra minutes to your valuable day. For example, there at the right you see Kristanne demonstrating the combination cereal-eating\bicep curl. Notice the toned muscles, the healthy glow. She's breathing deeply of life's rich oxygen, and so can you! Now, instead of wasting your breakfast time reading Tolstoy or improving your mind with logic puzzles, you can literally curl your flakes. As an added bonus, if your cereal is rich in minerals, you can even safely say that you are in fact, "pumping iron." |
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| IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER -- At this point, the author wishes to disclose that he has only had 5 hours of sleep and has spent the greater part of the day singing either "It's Joe Albertson's...super-market, but the meat department is mine," or the "Flaming Piece of Poop In the Sky," song of his own writing (which, surprisingly enough, Kristanne doesn't really care for all that much). Accordingly, he is not responsible for his actions, even though they may include slightly surreal writing and some really bad puns. Thank you. | |
| Mercifully, that's all for today's installment of the Kamping Korner. We'll think about returning when I've demonstrated that I'm ready for the responsibilities that come along with it. The Kamping Korner -- An Oasis of Civility In An Unmannered World. | |
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For those of you actually looking for some information from this feature, today started out as a Five Star Day On The Odyssey. We woke up early in a lovely campground, blissfully alone after a good night's sleep. We had a nice breakfast of plums and cereal and set out to drive the hour or so to the ferry that would take us out to Ocracoke Island in North Carolina's Outer Banks. I've been excited about seeing these islands since the Odyssey began. There's something about a geographic feature that looks different or anomalous on a map that really makes me want to see it. The Outer Banks definitely qualify as "different." Essentially long, thin sandbars, this series of barrier islands rises out of the Atlantic Ocean about a two-hour ferry ride from North Carolina. No wider than about 1/2 mile at any given point, the chain of islands runs about 80 miles or so long. Great beaches, great sunshine, good swimming -- I was excited. |
The ferry ride was a nice two-hour stretch where I could get some work done while Kristanne read magazines in the soothing salt breezes. Things were feeling pretty idyllic as we pulled up to Ocracoke and cruised into the campground. As luck would have it, there was still a nice campsite available on the beach side of the campground, only a short walk from the surf and sand. Light-hearted and gay, we headed for the beach, ready for a swim, a tan, a read. It was there that we met...the Green Head Fly. "Green Head Fly." It sounds innocent enough. Green is a healthy color, right, full of life and health? Wrong. Dead wrong. In this case, the green was actually a sickly kind of ochre, a color of pain and disease. Ugly though they were, flies don't bite, do they? Wrong again. These flies bit...painfully and often. I quickly headed for the surf, eager to escape the flies and ready to do some of the kind of bodysurfing you do when you're from the Pacific Northwest (happily flop around a whole lot and then sink). Every time I looked in at Kristanne, she was stomping around her beach towel, swatting at herself, dancing a bit spastically, and muttering what might have been profanities, had a curse word ever in all of her life passed her chaste lips. She seemed distraught. It turns out that, oddly enough, she didn't really like getting bit by the Green Head Fly. In fact, she sort of hated it. But, the sun and the sea were fantastic, so we persevered for a time. After a great session of lumberjack bodysurfing during sunset, we headed back to the van. It was there that the horrors of the Green Head Fly revisited us. There were conservatively 20-30 Green Head Flies in the van. We had left some of the screens open to better ventilate the van. Now the Unclean Spirit had entered. We needed an exorcism. Fortunately, our whisk broom made a good flyswatter, and after a bloody struggle, the van was Green Head Fly Free. There ensued a brief respite of 20-30 minutes during which we conservatively downgraded our day to a Four Star Day on the Odyssey and counted ourselves lucky that the ordeal was over. But our suffering was not over. The horror returned, this time in the guise of a marauding cloud of mosquitoes that somehow managed to find space between the Green Head Fly welts that covered our bodies to bite us anew. I swear these little suckers were wearing hockey masks and carrying chainsaws. I thought I even heard one address another as "Cujo -- The Hellspawned Mosquito." Each opening of the van door produced a new crop of thirty or so mosquitoes that required termination. We were drill-team precise on our entries and exits, keeping open-door time to an absolute minimum, but somehow they still got in. It got so bad that Kristanne and I eventually refused to leave the van, no matter what the cost. North Carolina breeds some baaaaaad mosquitoes, man. | |
Sometime during the donnybrook that was Kristanne's battle against the biting insects of Ocracoke Island, she turned to me and after some consideration said, "Three and a half. Three and a half star day on the Odyssey." That's what insects can do to you, man. Next time, we're hosing out the van with Cutter's Insect Repellent before we go to Ocracoke, consequences be damned.
See you next time on the Odyssey!
Total Miles for 7/14 = About 80