OH I COULD THROW YOU IN THE LAKE OR FEED YOU POISONED BIRTHDAY CAKE
Since
we last spoke, I have had one wedding anniversay and one advanced
maternal age birthday; birthday yesterday and anniversary Friday.
To celebrate both, Gray and I boarded the dogs and hopped in the
car and drove to Yosemite for the weekend. Neither of us had ever
been before.
It
was lame.
I
found a bed and breakfast outside Yosemite on the internet, although
I wasn't really paying attention to the bed and breakfast part when
I booked it. It's more like little cabins, the proprietor said,
and that sounded good to me. So Gray leaves work early, we drive
and drive and drive, and have a cheeseburger snack at the McDonald's
drive-through in Gorman, because I am a fat pregnant lady now, and
the guy taking our money thinks Gray is Chris Daughtry from American
Idol. It turns out this happens fairly frequently, but this was
the first time in my presence. I said he can be anybody you want
if you give us free cheeseburgers.
So
we get to the B&B at like 7, and it's dark, and the place looks
charming from the outside, and the proprietor has clearly left Los
Angeles for Yosemite (raised in Van Nuys, ugh) to escape a life
of illegal substance abuse (her freneticness + my imagination =
this conclusion). She's nice but tries to charge us more than we
agreed on for the room, so I correct her and she's okay with it.
I should've gone lower.
She
takes us to the room and opens the door and it's small. "You
didn't tell me you were so tall!" she says. Is this required
B&B booking information or else they give you the Hobbit quarters?
I'll remember to wear a nametag with my height listed on it in the
future. She tells us it has all the amenities, including a jacuzzi
tub, which I'd taken note of on the website. I like jacuzzi tubs
on vacation, even though the idea of jet bacteria is a little grose.
I think, Okay, if it's new and clean it'll be relaxing to go in
it. So she leaves us alone in the room and we wander around, which
takes all of two seconds since it's built for elves. So I go into
the bathroom looking for the new gleaming white jacuzzi tub and
find this.
I've
spared you seeing the drain end of it, which contained caked black
hair, but at least you can appreciate the grout mold on the faucet
end. Needless to say we didn't take a jacuzzi. In fact, we saved
all of our body bathing until we got home.
So
then we go to Ducey's
for dinner, which is on Bass Lake, and was the restaurant in the
movie "The Great Outdoors" where John Candy stuffs himself
with a steak and wins a contest. I don't remember much about that
movie except thinking Chris Young was really cute. Whatever happened
to Chris Young?
So
the restaurant is full and we have to wait for twenty minutes. We
go upstairs to the bar which is where I've decided I'll have my
once-a-month nonalcoholic O'Doul's beer treat. We stand at the 'wait
to be seated' podium waiting to be seated, and there's a table of
14 locals right next to us. I look over at them and smile, and this
guy sitting sort of below me in his chair cocks his head back and
looks up at me. I look back at him. He doesn't smile, and he stares
at me for a full fifteen seconds. Now count that out and imagine
some redneck local staring at you unblinking and unsmiling for a
solid fifteen seconds. So I do what anybody would do, I match his
expression and stare back at him until he looks away. I win, redneck!
Welcome to Bass Lake! Then I drank my fake beer.
Saturday
morning we awoke at 6am to our rear cabin neighbors having a conversation
that sounded like they were six inches from our heads. Which they
were, it turned out, just behind the thinnest walls you've ever
seen. The woman, I'm guessing from Oklahoma, pounded on a door that
sounded like our door, and said, "Lane! What the hey-ull! You
unlock this day-umn door raght now!" Then they talked and talked
and talked, right into our ears being covered by our (possibly unlaundered)
pillowcases, about how they were going to Oregon and what they hoped
to see that day in Yosemite and why does breakfast start at nine
because that's ridiculous, Lane!
So
we eventually trudged to breakfast, where I got accosted by a woman
who fell in love with me and kept talking about my hair, and then
the next morning talked about it some more ("Did your mother
ever tell you you have angel hair?") and then told me my body
will be really good for birthing. Stop talking about my hair and
my body, strange lady! She had a husband, who was very quiet, and
who only spoke up when she started talking about how when I'm 37
weeks pregnant I should get help from Gray with some hormone or
something, and Gray and I were both like, "What?" and
the husband goes, "You know, he's got it and I've got it,"
and I said, "Ohhh, it's a wiener thing." Hippies in the
woods, I tell you.
This
is me. HA, not really. Although Ronald McDonald's color here is
pretty similar to mine. This lady got out of a tour bus at the Wawona
Tunnel area of Yosemite, stood right in front of me, and all I could
think was "I can sell this as stock photography." So there
she is, my hair doppleganger, minus the afro part of it.
There
were two metric tons of people at Yosemite, mostly Germans, and
it made
the whole nature thing seem kind of... crowded. Note cars lining
road.
Other
parts were cool, like the sign that said don't feed the deer or
you'll die. Even Germans who can't sprechen zee English can figure
that one out.
Gray
and I like deer and don't see too many of them, unlike people in
the mid and eastern US who see them all the time and hate them because
they eat your tulips. We like them because they're cute and aren't
around to eat our tomatoes or giant asparagus plants.
People
climb this thing called El Capitan in Yosemite, which is a sheer-faced
gigantic cliff. I have nothing in common with these people and think
they all must be totally batshit-crazy.
That's
my assy arrow, and those little dots are people. I took this looking
up with a 200mm lens. These people sleep clinging to this rock,
just hanging there, and you can see their flashlights at night.
Don't ask how they go to the bathroom because I don't know. I just
wouldn't want to be the guy underneath.
The
best part of the trip was taking pictures of the lady with the dog
in her backpack.
He's
like, "Oh my god, I have to look away, I can't believe she
put Ruffles in that backpack. Aren't our collapsable HON bikes enough
of a spectacle?"
Awesome.
Another
highlight was meeting Clif, the maitre-D at the Awahnee
Hotel restaurant. He let me take his picture, which I made blurry
with my fumbling meaty hands, but wouldn't have this been the raddest
photo in the world if it was decent? We did not sign up and go back
for Sunday brunch because it was $35 a person and even I have my
birthday limits.
Then
we had a big fattening lunch, because that's what I'm all about
on my birthday.
Mine was a delectable chicken pesto on a pita, and Gray taunted
me with a footlong Italian hoagie which I could have no part of
because the healthcare system is mean, just mean to pregnant women
these days where it comes to bologna. The carrot sticks are hidden
by the multitude of chips, but I promise they're there.
Okay,
then we drove around for like 10 hours or something and saw a bunch
of nature and then got Mexican food and went back to the B&B
as late as we could because we couldn't face its dirty groseness.
I refused to have sex because of the cardboard walls (I am a prude)
and we were both kind of thinking we'd get the clap from all the
B&B grime if we did it anyway, so I think we watched Law and
Order and fell asleep. We're ninety. Then at 1am we woke up to the
sounds of the coked proprietor in our ears (again, actually in the
cabin behind us) leading some people to their room. And for some
reason their talking went on until two, so we laid there staring
at the ceiling, exhausted, not having sex, wondering when it would
end. And it ended in the morning when we drove home and decided
maybe we don't have to go back to Yosemite anytime soon.
The
end.
Oh,
here's a photo of my birthday booty. Pippi Longstocking = awesome.
September
music:
9.1.06
: Scissor Sisters - Monkey Baby
9.8.06 : Sting - Shape of My Heart
9.12.06 : Angels and Airwaves - Good Day
9.19.06 : Blue October - Into the Ocean
9.22.06 : Keane - Broken Toy
9.26.06 - Blondefire - LLLove
