We've decided to upholster the pie and eat the chair with vanilla ice cream.

I'm posting this via email and I'm going to try to attach photos but I'm not sure how that's going to work, if they'll stay where I put them or if they'll all end up at the bottom or what. I guess we'll see.

Kelly emailed me this morning to let me know that my bed and breakfast post showed up in her read feeder but not anywhere else, and I told her yeah, that's because about three hours after I wrote it the whole "Sam/Ron" name thing had been totally reasonably explained and that tomato coconut milk soup was pretty damn delicious, so given that and the generosity with which the local wine was being poured, I made the executive and chagrined decision to save that post to draft.

Then the pineapple mashed potatoes made a strangely yellow appearance and a whole bunch of gourmet, gargantuan pearl tapioca jiggled onto the scene so I republished.

We had a hilarious time, and I know I didn't make the point I wanted to make yesterday, that point being how surreal it was to drive three hours into the heart of nowhere only to be ushered into a stranger's kitchen and told hey! Imported tapioca and tropical mash, get your bib on! 

Anyway. 

The Chiricahua Mountains are gorgeous; these towering rock formations called "sky islands" formed by water and ice and time and gnomes and a wizard and sand. 

    

Randy was gung-ho for a fourteen or fifteen-hour hike and I was down to drive by some rocks with the windows down, so we compromised and hiked about four miles. 

 

This is me taking a picture of Randy taking a picture of me.

Much to Randy's dismay and alarm I chose to wear sneakers rather than regulation hiking boots.

"Don't come crying to me when your ankles are all wobbly," he told me over his shoulder. 

Periodically throughout the hike I'd yell, "Help! My ankles are collapsing! Splints! I need splints!"

At which point he'd put his fingers in his ears.

Randy taking a picture of me taking a picture of Randy.

Much to my dismay and alarm Randy chose to wear the longest socks he could find. I told him his socks were falling down about eleven thousand times.

"How are your knees?" I asked. "Are they cold? You should pull your socks up over your knees."

"I might, Erin. You don't know."

This was actually the day before, right after we checked into the B&B and drove up to the Chiricahuas so we could contemplate life and nature and which of our clothes we might possibly eat for dinner.

I don't actually remember what this specific signpost said, but more than one detailed a story about some covered wagon or another bound for settlement that made the awesome decision to break away from the wagon train to take a "shortcut" through this Apache territory.

Years later the army would invariably find one or two of the daughters enslaved in an Apache camp, and the girls would just sort of shrug, like, "yeah, I guess that shortcut was a pretty shitty idea."

Thanks for trying to shave a couple days off the trip, Dad.

 

It really was beautiful. And Randy even broke his diet protocol and had something other than an apple for breakfast; it saved the day, really, since I'm pretty sure otherwise I would have found him curled up on a rocky trail somewhere, shakily waiting for me to come along and feed him green onion pulp through an eye dropper and trying to yank his socks up over his head. 

Unfortunately it was a one time dietary breach so I was forced to eat this entire apple pie alone. In the garage. With a gardening trowel. 

 

That is a five-pound apple pie. And that's all apples in there, too, it's not like you cut it open and there's a big wad of paper towels in the middle or something. It's so enormous that other, smaller apple pies actually fall into its gravitational field; when we got home there were four normal-sized pies hovering outside the car. Which I ate. Immediately. For their own safety.

I took it to my parents' house because I needed witness to the majesty and we held a ruler up next to it for the sake of photographic perspective:

Totally unreadable. The pie renders conventional measurement moot. I mean, look, its bigger than the chair, for God's sake.