For those who don't know or want to know more, go to www.greatlakesrelay.com.
I shall chronicle here my epic journey in my own ranty semi-coherent fashion. It's in an "as-remembered through my own particularly-distorted slight-liberties-may-be-taken" style of communication. Blogs will be updated as fuzzy facts are corrected.
This chapter is the PreAmble Ramble, the day before we actually participated in the relay race.
Thursday morning I took off of work and headed out to Berkley Michigan to begin my epic saga.
I got to Don's first and we started assembling the gear as people showed up.
The players:
- Don: Organizer, lightening fast runner, epic personality
- Me: Canadian (link is to a much needed glimpse into what I stand for)
- Dan: Avid reader, IT guy, lanky, sharp wit, analytical mind
- Bill: Older gentleman, great sense of humor and fun but also prone to boil over a bit
- Tim: Our elder statesman, long windblown gray hair, fun loving and self depreciating. Wants to kick my ass for my labeling of him as self-depreciating so let me also add, a go-getter with a strong sense of self and a force to be reckoned with!
- Miguel: Just moved to Florida, goes by Michael, master camper, quick runner
- Melissa: groupie! Michael's Babe, best organizer I've ever met in my life, patience & tolerance of a saint
- Rose: Melissa's dog. Small but not hyper. Nothing except an air horn rattles this dog
- Gabe: cool young cat, lean mean running machine with wacked hair and a dollop of moxie
- Aleah: groupie! Gabe's Babe, likes biking. Has Yoga Matt Will Travel. Subtle wit.
- Rob: A bit of mystery, cool-hand-luke style wicked fast fella. With hat can pass for Australian.
- Aimee: Cute, fast, great sense of humor, can blend in or stand out depending.
- Tom: Aimee's boyfriend.. bodybuilder who is now running as well, looks like he could run through a brick wall. Wicked smart. Talked into this thing by Aimee.
The assembling of the gear reminded me a lot of doing a one billion piece crossword puzzle as a child. I marveled as things were brought out and laid out and then moved into piles. Piles were assimilated into heaps. Heaps were distributed back to piles. The sun got hot. I realized, and this would hit me over and over again throughout the trip, just how much planning had gone into this and just how little I had even thought about this event! I guess it's good that they didn't assign any tasks to the guy with the life crises going on! I thought me packing up and finding Don's house was a huge accomplishment on my end. That's where my head was going into this thing.
I realized I had 2 bags, a pillow, 2 cases of beer, and a sleeping bag. After seeing the piles I realized further that I best just have one bag, a pillow, 2 cases of beer, and a sleeping bag. We barely jammed everything into place and it started to dawn on me that my bag was a terrible camping bag. Stuff was just literally jammed into a bloated overstuffed satchel. Later on I would realize how bad of a camping idea this is.
Gabe decided he had to have bizarre misshaped hair for this adventure so as we packed, Aleah took out the shears and.. made a mess of his head. From surfer hair to.. I don't know what! He was going to get it cut shorter and normal before he went back to work so this was a weekend hair experiment to make our team even goofier? it worked!
We had 3 cars. Let's cut to the chase. Someone had Patron. Someone else had Whiskey. I had Rum. I think the beer tally was 4 cases of beer. I had Molson and Labatts (I like to represent both parts of Canada, eh) and Tim had Lite. He told me "I figured if people don't like it they can get their own!" Truth be told, people didn't like Lite and drank my stuff first! Poor Lite! It gets no respect. Full Disclaimer: I HATE LITE! So I had a secret feeling of beer victory when all my beer went first. SuBEERiority complex. Actually I have nothing against any beer, I just know that I personally cannot stand Lite. However I drink Pabst, RWB, Bud Light, etc, I have no mandatory beer genre demands. Drink what you Lite. I mean, Like! Anyways! With those important details settled, we left for our epic journey.
We drove. Along the way we passed a place I wished we would have stopped at. "Weinerlicious." A small hot dog stand with a ginormous hot dog out in front that seemed to dwarf the size of the actual hot dog shack itself. Weinerlicious! Come on! Really? Yes. I am half glad we didn't stop though because.. could any actual hot dog measure up to the grandiose promise made by that epic hot dog out front? That's a tough check to cash.
See?
http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/06/82/f1/94/you-can-see-this-place.jpg
I mean. Wow.
We got to the campsite and first off we ran into an epic ranger woman whom I dub Ranger CutiePieDanger. I only bring this up because her vocal demeanor did not match her cute hot little ranger outfit nor her cute-as- a-button nose and twinkly eyes.. in fact the discord was jarring. She informed us and me particularly (!) multiple times that we were to have TWO cars per campsite and no more! And she would be checking! As her cute sparkly face stared me down as she said this I was sort of baffled, I felt like she was flirting with me a bit, based on body language and facial expression and chemistry but her tone of voice was completely the opposite! Oh women.. you are such mysteries.Was this all in my head? I admit this is possible.
To further my confusion, a car of young cuties pulled up and I noticed in the background as Don completed our registration that they talked with CutiePieDanger and then pulled off to the side. Thought nothing of it until CutiePieDanger came over to us and asked us if they were with us. "Nope," I replied, to which she said they didn't have their park permit. And that without a park permit they couldn't camp and SHE WOULD BE CHECKING! She said this, looking at me again with bedroom eyes and with "you will be destroyed" tone of voice. She mentioned they seemed pretty distraught as if this would make us admit "OK OK they are with us! you got us! You busted our ring of campsite babe smuggling wide open!" However they were not with us.. so said scenario was not reality. So sad. I would have loved to have been a part of a campsite babe smuggling operation. I would have used all Canadian women. Infiltration is the key.
Don was puzzled enough with CutiePieDanger's activities to double-check with her that OUR sticker was OK, but Ranger CutiePieDanger didn't even look at the back of our car! We were all set she said.
WTF?
We drove on and unpacked. Ranger CutiePieDanger was true to her word, she patrolled religiously, I saw her go by in her Truck .. I wanna say 5 times that evening. I do not know what happened to the car of distraught babes. We did not see them parked there in the morning. I mean all they had to do was cough up 11 bucks or so for the frickin permit.
Back to the setup. As we unpacked we were greeted by a surprising number of fans and well wishers. And by that I mean skeeters. Holy crap dudes. Out comes the bug spray. We had many flavours and we all settled on the popular "it may give us cancer but we wont itch tonight" blend.
I had no tent! The guy who was bringing the tent for me to borrow (Michael) was not there yet, he and his lady were out boating. So I pulled out my stuff and made a pile and did what any Canadian would do in such a situation. Drank beer and goofed around. Eh. Should I ease up on my Canadian references? It's my blog I can do what I want to. Sorry.
At some point we went out and ate a lot of spaghetti at a charity function and the rest of our team showed up there to meet us. Avengers Assembled!
We came back, it got pitch black then Michael and Melissa dug me out a tent to use.
Since I had never camped before ever, and had brought no flashlight. assembling my tent in the pitch black of night with skeeters nipping at all parts of my body was fantastic. The bonus of the darkness was no one saw me flailing around like a turrets patient suffering random gran mal seizures as I made what can be artistically portrayed as some form of attempt to put up a tent. It went about as expected, eventually I asked Michael for help. And he walked over and assembled it while talking about other things in about 45 seconds.Thanks!
And so we finished up some drinking because some of us (me included) had to get up at 4am.. and we settled into our tents. I discovered the best bet for me was to wear jeans, a long sleeved shirt, my running jacket and my cap and lay on top of my sleeping bag so to have enough padding. It was so uncomfortable that I sipped from my rum for a while, while listening to a podcast, until lethargy literally forced all the weird other elements out of my brain and I popped off the headphones and slept like a baby under the 345 trillion buzzings of hungry skeeters hovering over my skeeter proof refuge.
Disclaimer: I am sure there was a better way to go to sleep but keep in mind.. first night camping EVER for me.. and pitch fucking black. I just winged it. winged it. wings. millions of wings... buzzzzzzzzzzzz. buzzzzzzzzzzz. buzzzzzzzz. zzzzz
Next up: Day One of the Relay!
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