I wish I had a recording of Mouse, oh, at about the age of eight, saying, “Dad took us on a death march.” With a tone of complete, absolute, utter disgust, emphasis on the word “Dad.” I do not have such a recording and Mouse never actually said that. I’m paraphrasing something she did say one day, “Dad said the D word once and the P word twice!” I can remember it as clearly as a bell. The three of them had just emerged from the jeep after some sort of little Saturday afternoon junket around the Planet Ann Arbor and I do not remember just exactly what had happened but *nobody* looked very happy.

The GG is a master at leading people on death marches, one of the most famous of which happened in the badlands on The Lizard’s 10-year-old trip. I wasn’t there that time but I went there a few years later and I can easily see how a hike in the badlands could turn into a death march. That was also the trip on which they were in a tornado in a Minnesota campground and a tree fell on their tent and an Australian lady in the shelter said, “Oi miss moi mommy too but she’s moils away.”

Today, we went on a death biathlon. I got up at 5:45 am and we were out the door by 6:40. We hid our kayaks in the bushes at the Chase Bridge put-in on the South Branch of the Au Sable River north of Roscommon, then drove on up and parked in the Smith Bridge parking lot. We walked the Mason Tract foot-trail all the way down to the kayaks, then launched the kayaks and paddled back to the car. I think it’s somewhere around an eleven mile trip each way. It took us 3-1/4 hours to walk and a little less than 2-1/2 to paddle. The GG is dead to the world but he promises GPS-generated statistics a little later. Me? I think I’ll walk down to the point and back.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.