Memorable Experiences
There are a few things they neglect to mention in the tourist brochures.
We'd brought sleeping bags said to be good to something like 20 degrees Fahrenheit, but on the first night we were colder than we had ever been in our lives. Later, we learned it had snowed in a nearby town. (Our guide, bless her heart, then taught us how to use our life jackets as foot warmers.)
Cynthia's vivid memories include inadvertently drinking her coffee through her Deet-soaked mosquito netting, and her first portage.
When she disembarked to prepare to portage around whitewater, Shirley sank in mud up to her thighs.
We were secretly glad it was our guide, and not us, who had a close encounter with a leech.
One of us, a novice to canoeing, got tossed into the drink as she tried to get back into the boat after our first lunch.
And as we sadly faced the end of our vacation, in the Minneapolis airport, Susan had a fit when they asked for her photo ID and she realized she had packed it far down into a bag (which bag?) -- because who needs ID on a wilderness canoe trip? There she sat, on the floor of the airport, madly pulling things out of her luggage and tossing them about. The last thing she said to Mary and Cynthia was "Go. Go! You can't help!" To their credit, they are still her friends.
Now this would have been bad enough for Shirley if it were the first time. But no. Just six months earlier, Susan and Shirley were going to spend Easter weekend with Susan's brother Chip in Florida. They spent Thursday night packing, and writing a long note to the neighbor who was going to take care of their pets. They got two hours of sleep and arose at two a.m. in order to be at the Baltimore Airport for a six a.m. flight. Susan had decided to travel light, and of all things failed to take her driver's license. The airline personnel demanded photo ID, and she had none. No tactic worked: neither charm, nor tantrum. The woman behind the counter, who was coming off the night shift, would not be moved. Susan called and woke her neighbor Doris, who rushed over to their house and then into town, to fax a copy of Susan's license to the airport, but it was impossible to do it in time (forgive me, Doris). In shock, Susan and Shirley watched stand-bys take their place on the plane, and watched the plane take off. They drove home and went back to bed.
So you can imagine Shirley's state of mind as she watched Susan frantically searching for her photo ID on the floor of the Minneapolis airport. That they lived to celebrate their twentieth anniversary in 1999 is due in part to the fact that Susan did find it in time to board the plane (not to mention Shirley's having learned to cope with such behavior). |
