After one of the most epic last days of work in all history (Dillon and I both got pied in the face and thrown into the ocean) we bid our adieus to the beautiful island of Key Largo and faced the reality of our lives: We were yet again homeless and unemployed with no where to go. AWESOME. You'd think the second time around it would be less scary, but it's not. However it is equally fun as hell. The rush we got leaving the place we had called home for the past year was thrilling and encouraging. So we set off back to the only natural starting point in our adventure; Boulder, CO.
The car ride would take us a few days to accomplish so we ended up setting up a couple of camping spots along the way. The only problem was, that week happened to be the most boiling hot record breaking week of the summer ever made. When I called to see if a couple of the campsites had tent sites available for the evening, the women pretty much laughed in my ear and asked me if I was aware that it was 110 degrees. I told them yes I was and that we were some crazy tent camping mo-fo's. And so we camped. And it really, really sucked. But as always, these are the times when the best memories and stories come about.
It was so hot the night we were in Arkansas (seriously, who camps in Arkansas???) that we decided to rip up one of Dillon's shirts and dunk it in ice water from our cooler. We proceed to tie strips of cold cloth around ours and Avery's heads and necks. We looked re-god-damn-diculous. Like a couple of kids that play pretend that they're going into battle or something and make costumes out of whatever articles of clothing are lying around the house. It was really really fun :) Man do I wish I had pictures of this.
The other night that we camped we were at a beautiful site in Alabama. We showed up and were pretty stoked about it so we parked the car and started setting up just as the sun was going down. That's when it all began. Now if you know anything about me, you know that I have two real fears in life: children and spiders. I HATE SPIDERS. Worse than Ron Weasley. I have to say, living in Florida really toughened me up on the whole spider thing after having cockroaches the size of basketballs jump on me and swarms of mosquitoes that made going outdoors impossible some of the time. But I still really hate spiders. Dammit I'm getting all squirmy thinking about them. Yuck. Just as the sun was setting and it was getting pretty dark I was grabbing some last minute things out of the car with Dillon. All of the sudden he looked at me with this weird face on his face that read I should be panicking but I'm going to remain calm. "Crystal....RUN."
You know how in The Hunger Games there's all those weird mutant trakerjacker thingys and wolf mutations? These were daddy-long-leg mutations. With legs so long that these puppies might have fit on the palm of your hand if you spread it open as far as you could. I looked down at my feet and there were HUNDREDS of them. I had obviously stomped into a nest because I was surrounded, all over and around my feet. And I ran like bloody freakin hell.
So yah, that messed me up a bit. I spent the next couple of minutes flailing in a gyrating dance of sorts brushing non-existent bugs off every part of me. After a while I finally calmed down a bit we went up to our campsite and decided to make a fire. Still freaked out, I shined the flashlight over at the pile of firewood just in time to see a tarantula sized spider crawl over and into the logs. And that was just about enough to set me over the edge. I jumped up onto the picnic table screaming as Dillon sifted through the logs to find nothing. He explained that I was just freaked out from the incident before and I was hallucinating. But I had seen it. The damage was irreparable. Shaking, I sat down with my back to the picnic table trying to convince Dillon that I wasn't crazy and would not go anywhere near the fire. Just as he was starting to make me think that maybe I was just freaking myself out, I stood up and turned around facing the flashlight on the table I had just been sitting at. And there, directly where I had been sitting, was the most intricate woven web that spanned the entire length of the underside of the picnic table. And in the middle, like the mighty Thor laughing in the face of his opponents, the master web spinner himself.
I can't think of many times I've ever seen Dillon truly overcome by fear. But dear lord this was one of them. As I slipped into a psychotic splendor Dillon grabbed the lighter fluid and torched that little demon to a slow, gruesome death. It was truly like being in the middle of a horror movie. I refused to come out of the tent for the rest of the night. I wouldn't even go pee. From that day forward, that beautiful Alabama campground would be known as "Spider Den."
(By the way, there aren't many pictures on this blog because I started to google a photo of a spider and almost vomited on my computer. So, sorry about that.)
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