Econundrum

I ran away.  My summer has been adventure inadequate. Derring-do deficient. Insufficiently impromptu.  It was time to fix all that. 

I went to Arkansas. Perhaps not a cooler choice temperature wise, but a cool place, nonetheless. I like to go to Arkansas because I like to drive really fast around the curves in the mountains, hearing the tires squeal, making my passengers hang on to the 'omigosh' handles in the car, and say between gritted teeth, "do you really have to do that?"

Oh yes, I do. I really do.

The fact that this was a solo trip did not deter me from my Jeff Gordon imitation.

I'm guessing that due to the ultra-warm summer, camping is not a favorite activity for many people right now. I was the only human in the entire campground. The other loner kept wandering by to see if there was anything good to eat. There was not.

The singular nature of my venture influenced my food choices. When it's just me, I see no reason to light a fire, start up the campstove, or haul a lot of food that requires preparation, aka work.

So it's fruit, cereal, protein bars, and milk.  Lots of milk. Milk does my body good. But herein lies the problem. With just me to feed, it only requires about a half gallon a milk a day. With the family there, it requires more like three quarts. One of us is ba-moo-ga.

So do I do the environmentally and more economically wise thing and take  quart boxes, hoping that I can find ice and it won't spoil if I don't drink it all?  Or do I commit a cardinal sin of environmentalism and buy milk in tiny- serving size boxes- a bunch of them?

I did the bad deed. I bought a couple dozen of 4-packs of these little shelf-stable milk boxes. No ice required. I am not opposed to drinking room temperature milk. And they have plain, chocolatized, and strawberry-tized versions.  If it makes the purists out there feel any better, the boxes can be recycled. It made me feel only a tiny bit less guilty, as I sucked down six of these babies a day.

And lest you think that the whole trip was spent lolling around camp eating, here's a couple of hints of what else I did:

Hiking. More to come about that. I think my name was mentioned in conjunction with mental deficiency, by the trail crew who asked if I was lost. When I said no, they asked if I knew it 104 degrees. "Yep, I know," I said, and kept walking.

And the highlight. The daunting, daring, antidote to summer inertia. More about that later, too. I didn't scream, if that's what you're wondering.