GPS = Going Postal Shortly

Saturday morning I stumbled out of bed, waddled to the kitchen and pressed the button to start the coffee (I always make it the night before so that I don't have to count out scoops and pour water because I'm not the most graceful of creatures when I wake up - I think I mentioned some stumbling) and looked out my kitchen window to see a glorious display of sparkling sunshine. I did a double take and threw my glasses on to make sure the thermometer outside the window really said 60 degrees. It really did.

Suddenly I was wide awake. I knew that the sun shining on the thermometer was probably giving it a few extra degrees, but still, not quite 10am on a shiny Saturday morning and it's almost 60? C'mon, we gotta get out of here.

So I burst back into our bedroom and leaped on top of MDH, who was still snoozing, and started jumping up and down and jostling him all over. Wake up man (bounce). It might be our last day of sunshine and warmth before we're snowed in for the next 5 months (bounce-bounce). Get up, let's go, daylight is a wastin'!

Props to my sleepy head darling. He always seems to come through with no fussing on such occasions as an exuberant, overly perky wife bouncing on his head on a Saturday morning, demanding that he wake the hell up, throw on some clothes and a ball cap and get the hell out of the house.

Originally we were just going to go for a little walk around our neighborhood, several blocks down to the farmer's market and then on to our favorite little brunch spot (my personal favorite is the Hash Benedict found on menu page 4 (with potatoes, of course)), but I decided instead to go for something a bit more outdoorsy. I know. It's out of character for me. We ended up driving a few towns over to a big park with paved walking and bike paths that meander through beautiful woods and over trickling streams and such. We had never been there before, but it didn't look that big on the map I printed from the park website. Even considering my fucked up ankle it seemed do-able.

So we walked and walked, and walked, and walked. It was great. Up to a point. The point at which it stopped being great was when I realized that we had been walking for almost an hour and everything had started to look the same and we had not encountered another living soul for quite awhile. Not even a squirrel.

More significantly, at the same moment I also realized that I was starving and I had to pee - now. I stopped abruptly and declared victory on our outdoorsy walk in the woods assuming that we would of course be turning around and walking back out the way we came in.

Alas it was not going to shake out like that. No.

MDH has never been a man who likes to take the same route twice and consulted the GPS on his Blackberry for a route that would not require turning around. He announced that we were almost out of the woods anyway and that we had only to keep going a little further and would "soon" encounter a cemetery and after that a "neighborhood" which would provide a "flat", "paved" route for us to walk back to our car.

Yes the quotes are there to denote exactly the words that MDH used and also to emphasize the fact that our route back to the car was none of these things.

It was not soon.

Once we found the cemetery what we encountered next was certainly not a neighborhood and definitely not flat.

Although the road was indeed paved it was so busy with speeding traffic that I was forced much of the way to walk in the gravel berm (over several different lumps of roadkill of various species and states of decay).

All the while MDH, who recognized his blunder, kept flapping his lips and saying things like "almost there" and using words like "adventure" and "excitement". Again - it was none of those things.

Our exciting, almost there adventure caused me to become two things I truly hate to be - sweaty and dirty - at the same time. Plus after stepping in what I'm pretty sure used to be a baby rabbit I wanted to burn my shoes, hurl them into the woods and incinerate the whole goddamn place. I didn't do that of course, but if I had had my purse with me I would have used it to beat MDH senseless.

Eventually we made it back to the car and the outhouse style smelly hole in the ground toilet with no tissue that I had considered using before we started walking but had decided to wait because it looked like a smelly hole in the ground that probably didn't have any toilet tissue. So after all that time I had hold it in just that much longer so that I could trek back to the car to grab some of the surplus fast food napkins that thank baby jesus I always store in the glove box in case of such emergencies.

Anyhoo... I lived to tell the tale. I'm feeling as inspirational as that blind guy that climbed Mt. Everest. I might even write a book and there will be a Lifetime Original movie about how I managed to survive the elements, skipped breakfast and used Wendy's napkins for toilet paper.