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Pastimes : NNBM - SI Branch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: altair19 who wrote (43884)	6/3/2005 1:49:35 AM
From: elpolvo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 104159

a19- Is this the highest the water has been in recent history? How much draft does your boat have? Damn, that looked like so much fun. yes. sorry, no draft, just cans and bottles. what'll ya have? ;-) -lep86

To: altair19 who wrote (43884)	6/3/2005 4:16:54 PM
From: Crocodile	Respond to of 104159

altair~ after a springtime that seemed like it would never come, we are suddenly plunged into hot, humid days with the sun searing down upon us. i should be rejoicing this change in the weather, but i guess it's just a little too sudden for me. this morning, i was out doing some river reconnaissance with a friend and we felt like we were just about baked after an hour in the sun. we got to talking about being in stifling places, and that led to discussions of old houses and apartments that we rented when we were younger. that also set me to thinking of places mr. croc and i have stayed during our wanderings around the country. when we travel, we tend to be rather nomadic and don't make a heck of a lot of plans... we usually just "go" and figure things out along the way. as we tend not to care much for fancy accommodations, we sometimes stay in decidedly unpretentious B&Bs (very often on farms), or sometimes just in the dorms at a university. some of our trips have been laughable due lack of planning and circumstances (almost) beyond our control. some of the best of the worst have been places we've stayed when the weather is stifling hot. there are a few that make me laugh as soon as they come to mind. some years ago.. i think maybe 1989... we tripped out east to Nova Scotia during the middle of a heat wave. we drove down via Fredericton, N.B., and stayed at the university dorms -- a big room with 2 beds rented for ten bucks a night, so it seemed like a steal... until we wandered upstairs to dump off our bags before heading off for dinner. whew!! was it HOT in this older building...and the windows were ridiculously small. we looked at each other in dismay and decided that a trip to the department store for a fan would be a damned fine idea. that fan practically saved our lives for the rest of the trip. we stuck it in the window of the dorm bedroom and it did a so-so job of cooling off our room. turned out that we were the only people staying in the entire dorm, so we left our door open for the night. we were quite happy to leap up in the morning and head off to catch the early run of the St. John to Digby ferry that morning. next sweltering stop was a night spent in a B&B owned by a tiny old lady who warned us that we might want to go up to our room to check it out before saying we'd stay the night. man.. another ripping hot room, but at least the window was large, so we figured that our fan would make it tolerable. before retiring, the lady served up a plate of zucchini loaf, then sat there with the sharpest pair of scissors i've ever seen, doing this sort of snip snip snip thing with them while she chatted away. we get up to our room and are debating leaving the door open as she had said to do that if we like. mr. croc and i almost blurt out at the same time, "what in hell was with that scissor thing!!!" i point out the window to the huge stand of hollyhocks below and say.... wonder what she feeds those to make them grow like that?!! we both break into hoots of laughter at the implications. in the end, we left the door open and slept like the dead and even awoke without finding ourselves the victims of some "Arsenic and Old Lace" scenario. the rest of the trip was relatively uneventful. we stayed in air-conditioned places most of the other nights.. and as i can't remember any of them, i guess that means they weren't too memorable... i thought those days were over, but not so. a couple of years ago, we travelled down east again, but with a friend from Amsterdam. we weren't positive about our departure date for the east, so we hadn't made reservations for the first night and figured we'd have no trouble getting a room as we'd heard that travel was really down in the east that summer. unfortunately, once again, we were traveling in the midst of a record-breaking heatwave. we get to this town we've stayed in a number of times when passing through on the way out east... and can we get a room? no way! finally, someone gives us info on a motel that has litte cabins off at the end of its property. we figure, "how bad can these be?" wrong question. oh.. they were bad..as in hot! with just a ceiling fan.. we felt like we were going to die from heat prostration. i have some funny photos from that trip... with us sitting around in our t-shirts and shorts looking frazzled.. there was no television in the room, which didn't bother me but drove mr. croc and our friend bananas. at one point, our friend got so hot and bored that she got out the Gideon's Bible and started reading some part of it aloud in her melodic Dutch voice... solemnly... (all three of us are agnostics, so you might guess how much sense this made). it was pathetic and the photos show it. we slept with the door open and just the screen door shut. in the middle of the night, the humidity in the room got so high that the smoke alarm went off!!! but mr. croc and our friend were so dead to the world that they just moaned and groaned and my friend kept shouting half-unintelligibly, "Vut is dat?!! Vut is dat??!!" Meanwhile, ever the quick-acting-quick-thinking croc, i grabbed a ricketty chair and stood on it while tugging on the smoke alarm until i managed to disembowel it of its battery. after that, there was no getting back to sleep for me... in the morning, as we left, i noticed this scowling 10 foot tall folk art wooden "padre" with a bible lecturing from the front lawn of a house as we drove down the street to get back on the highway. seemed like he was trying to impart some kind of message upon us.... probably something like "Next time, make reservations!" (o: ~croc