Morgan and Cameron donate!

This past Sunday I drove to New Iberia thinking that dad and I'd hang out, talk about our plans, maybe set one thing in stone, and he'd buy me dinner. He had gone upstairs to what I thought was take a nap. I was trolling the book shelves looking for Lonesome Dove when dad walks downstairs seersuckered out.

"Dad, you look nice..."
"Thanks."
"Any particular reason?"
"Morgan Weiland's wedding, you should come."
"When is it?"
"In about an hour."

I refused politely, pretty sure that I hadn't been invited, but five minutes before go time, dad convince me to get topped and tailed, although I knew that I'd be really sweaty sitting outside in the brutal May heat (I've been recently told that "sultry" makes the weather sound much more romantic than really really hot and humid).

Anyway, Morgan had invited dad to the wedding when he was in D.C. last fall raising money for the brand new scholarship fund, which Morgan and Cameron (I guess her monetary er ins and outs are now also his) donated to. So I'm considering this wedding as our unofficial beginning to this adventure. Plus the Tates were there so it seems like a good place to begin, although they gave money long before this blog and bus trip ever materialized.

Anyway, the wedding was beautiful, the bride and groom were generous and wonderful, and we got to sit next to Cameron's uncle and aunt who told us about their adventure:

For the past three years, they've been living on a 42' sailboat, moving from port to port, paying off local bandits, and generally living their dream. They had bought dress clothes specifically for the wedding and were planning to chuck them before they got back on the boat. They had a great story about a boat part, island bureaucracy, and a thousand pesos, but I had two of the stiffest gin and tonics I've ever had in my life, so that's that.

Sleeping bags, continued.

After I told dad my sleeping bag story, he one-upped me with his own.

"I drove up to Kisatchie to test out my bike fully loaded for the first time. I got up there in the afternoon, made sure that I had everything in the saddlebags, and rode for about 30 miles until I had found a camping spot.

I got there as it was starting to get dark--this was in February--so I got my stove out and made some supper. After I finished eating, I cleaned up and went to set up my tent. Now I had really packed everything, but I forgot my sleeping bag.

Its starting to get cold, like 30 degrees. Ok maybe forty, but that's still really cold. I thought to myself, 'Oh God, am I going to have to ride back tonight?' I decided not to and put on all my layers and tried to sleep. It was really cold. Then I remembered something Dr. Tate had told me years ago about when he used to camp in Tennessee. When it was cold, he would gather leaves and place them on top of himself to stay warm.

I got up and made a big pile of leaves. Then I tried to scoot the leaves on top of me, but its harder to do than you would think. Maybe if there had been another person to help, it would have worked.

So I thought, ok, how can I really get the leaves on top of me? I had brought a tarp along, so I put all the leaves on the tarp, and pulled the tarp on top of me. That worked at first, but then I found that if I moved at all, the leaves would all slide off of me, which of course, all of them did.

What else could I do? Now I had really brought everything with me, including a mosquito net. It took me about 3 hours to work up the energy to get myself up, but I finally did, and wrapped up the leaves in the net. This method worked the best by far. I really don't know how Dr. Tate did it."

While I put this story in quotation marks, I did so merely to convey that dad told me this story, not that these are the words that he used (although I tried my best to remember it verbatim!). However, this all occurred last weekend at Festival International and we had been sitting at Pamplona's bar for quite awhile drinking cava and capirinhas for mom's birthday. I hope you laughed at least once while reading this story because I was incapacitated with spasms when dad told it to me.

Tangipahoa, Alumni Trip 10.23.09

Here's a little story about a trip we took, and what the bus did.

No outing club trip is truly great without a minor disaster. Maybe we shouldn't have insisted on the bus picking us up in New Orleans, but we all like attention and trouble, and that bus attracts both. First sign was when we stopped to get gas and the bus wouldn't turn off. So, we put it in with the bus still on. Then we took an exit that brought us south into the middle of the marsh, rather than north towards the river. Which turned out to be fortuitous, considering that the bus stopped going any faster than 35 mph, and something started burning. We pulled over into a boat launch parking lot and checked it out. Something was smoking all right. We decided to keep going. But it kept smoking. We found a gas station and called James, who knows about bus mechanics.

Every gas station is different and they're always fun in these situations. This one had hot dogs that you had to pay for, but you could put as much chili and cheese as you wanted on it from the nacho machine. For free. But I digress.
To fix the bus, you find a hammer and use it to bang on the misbehaving part. It worked (to stop the engine from smoking, although we still couldn't turn the bus off), so we got back on the road and hit the river at sunset, rather than our midday estimate.

At the campsite, under the stars, we feasted on 200 raw oysters (which, by the way, explode when you leave then on the fire long enough).