If you can read, go ahead and knock that down to 20%.

If you're a child-- and this pertains both to children who are and aren't related to me-- and you're between the ages of Walking and Barely Reading, you can safely expect a solid 85% of our conversations to revolve around whether or not you have to go to the bathroom.

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.  

I meant flask. Big enough to hide a flask in it.

It's the Fourth of July weekend, as you know, meaning among other things that Randy has like fifteen whole hours off in a row. Being a natural adventurer he suggested we get out of town for the weekend and head south to Bisbee and the Chiricahuas.

I know what Bisbee is, it's an adorable Old West mining town where you stay in a haunted hotel and drink beer in what used to be the Arizona stock exchange building and where the temperature is a chilly 90 degrees down from 112. But.

"What's a Chiricahua?"

Whereupon Randy explained that on the way home from the Chiricahuas we pass through Wilcox which is where the homemade five-pound apple pie store is. That was pretty much the only definition of "Chiricahua" I needed to hear so I packed a scarf and a bunch of forks and off we went.

Bisbee was great, obviously, since it's almost impossible to go wrong in a haunted hotel drinking beer in the old stock exchange, plus they really do it up Garrison Keillor style for the Fourth of July. This morning the main street in town was cordoned off with plastic netting for the annual downhill coaster car race.

"Oh, it's a great time," one helpful citizen told us. "They come racing down the hill, around the curves and everything, it's a blast."

Can anyone do it?

"Well, used to be anyone could, sure, but then a few years back one of the cars got out of control and flew into the crowd, killed a man and his child. Horrible. So now they just let the kids do it. So the cars are lighter.

Uh huh. And that seemed to do the trick, did it?

"Oh yeah. Last year a car flew into the crowd and broke somebody's ankle, but that's it."

Needless to say we didn't stick around for the drilling or mucking competitions.

Chiricahua time! NO idea what that is. We drove two hours out of Bisbee into what is seriously the flattest most abandoned Godforsaken country I have ever seen, ever. It wasn't farmland because there weren't any farms, and it wasn't cattle land because there weren't any cattle. At one point I pulled up Foursquare on my phone, an application that uses GPS tracking to find popular locations around you? And I shit you not, the only location that popped up was one another user had manually entered called "BFE". A relief, actually, since I half expected to see "kidney poaching warehouse" or "hard sell suicide cult way station" listed in the nearby results.

So we'd arranged to stay at this bed and breakfast, right, the idea (near as I can figure) being that the Chiricahuas (?) are in the mountains, and there are trees and shade and babbling brooks and hiking and dappled sunlight and frogs and birds and pie and shit. But something somewhere went terribly wrong; I don't know if these Chiricahua things MOVED or what, but we pull up in front of the bed and breakfast and there's not a tree or a frog or a dappled pie or ANYthing even remotely NEAR it.

The rest I'll just paraphrase because I'm running out of time. Within three minutes of walking into the house the proprietor (whose wife calls him Ron but who told Randy and me to call him Sam) asked me if I wouldn't mind taking a look at his computer, see if I could maybe get his Skype working for him. Which, you know. Wasn't on my activity roster.

"We've got a great menu tonight," Ron/Sam said, rubbing his hands together. "Tomato soup with coconut milk, and then we've got some potatoes with fresh pineapple, and for dessert I'm doing a gourmet... imported... tapioca!"

And I'm just sitting there at this guy's kitchen table watching his wife in her pajamas at the ironing board in the hallway and I'm trying to decide whether or not he's just fucking with me. I look to Randy like, "Oh, you better save me here, husband," and I clutched his knee under the table and I think I may have even barked out a laugh before I could help myself.

But Randy's absolutely NO help because he's on this insanely strict diet right now where he can only have 500 calories a day and 450 of those calories are from celery, right, so in the land of fight or flight he's cruising at about eight thousand feet, him and his Ziploc bag of goddamned radishes.

And I'm not kidding you here, we are seven thousand miles away from ANYTHING. There ARE NO OPTIONS.

After unloading the car we drove another twenty miles up to the Chiricahuas, which near as I can tell are big giant rocks. I don't know, I didn't read any of the signs or anything; I was too busy worried about how much imported tapioca I'm going to have to suck back later.

We walked around a bit, not saying anything for a while- I was mentally lost in a "potatoes/pineapple" loop and Randy's only eaten two hundred calories so far today, he didn't really have the energy for speech. But at some point out of nowhere he goes, "We could just leave our shit, start driving now and be in Wilcox by eight."

As if I hadn't already done that math.

"That iPad was expensive."

"Oh. Right."

So now we're back in our room, dinner's in forty-five minutes, and I've been warned that the other guests tonight are a hundred and fifteen years old and they talk about nothing but politics.

I have to go shower and do my hair big enough to hide some bread in it.