Monday, June 23, 2008

Don't Eat the Flowers!

Blegh. I had a rough time uploading this one. So, this past weekend we went camping. Isaac wanted to go camping for his birthday, so we went. I have arbitrarily skipped all of the man-eating mosquitos and terrifying camp food, I figure that everyone is pretty familiar with all of that by now.
No, I would much rather talk about the adventure that we had the second day out. By this time, Isaac had discovered, once again, that he didn't actually like camping. He would have been just as happy to pitch a tent in the back yard and enjoy all the comforts of home. The campsite didn't even have an electrical hookup for his nintendo system! How could anyone expect him to live like this!?
Needless to say, he and Ian locked themselves away in the camper/trailer/thing and played Magic: the Gathering until it was time to leave.
While they were locked away, Mom, Dad, Alex and I decided to go hiking and Geocaching. (Geocaching is an entertaining little diversion where you get hopelessly lost in the wilderness on the pretense of looking for a box of useless trinkets that may or may not hve been hidden in said wilderness sometime in the past.) Mom gave up after about half a mile, claiming that she had a headache and headed back for the air-conditioned car.
The three of us who remained on this ill-begotten quest continued to trudge through the darkening woods. My two companions failed to obey some of the most important rules of woods-trudging.
1) They left the path. You should never leave the path! That's when the really nasty things come to get you.
2) They picked the mushrooms. Dad found these weird looking brain-coral-type mushrooms and wondered if they were edible, so he picked them and carried them around in his hat.
3)They may or may not have taken a drink of the swamp water. They deny it, but I'm sure that they did. I know for a fact that Alex ate a flower. That's just as bad.
This was the resultant tableau. They don't remember it, of course. Mushrooms and swamp water tend to have that effect. Russian forests are pretty good for me. Usually I end up in the Welsh countryside...