Set Your Monkey Free (2)
Set Your Monkey Free
Aug 10 & 11 (Days 2 & 3): The 1999 Fleetwood Jamboree Recreational Vehicle on loan to us from Kelly’s dad has kickin' A/C when hooked up to electric and parked to function as a temporary domicile….just not while driving to function as a transportation vehicle. So our drive-times mostly consist of sweating and of waiting. Average drive time between destinations on this trip is six hours. So, as I wisely foresaw, my playlist has become a crucial mental survival tool. I’m saying this as a person for whom playlists for any occasion truly matter (as those of us from the “mixtape” era unequivocally attest) but I am doubling down on my evangelical belief that music saves because, friend, hear me when I say that Missouri August heat is NO JOKE and thusly, in these circumstances, a back-to-back dose of, say, The Pretenders, Billy Idol, Weird Al and The Kinks is about the only thing keeping one from wailing delirium and heatstroke. That, and those yellow cans of Yerba Maté from Publix. And smoked almonds from Aldi.
Leaving Louisville for Johnson’s Shut-Ins, we stopped in Santa Claus, Indiana (it’s a thing, look it up) and in Collinsville, IL to see the world’s biggest ketchup bottle (please let the record show that I voted against this detour), and ultimately arrived in Mark Twain State Park , where we grilled hot dogs/veggie dogs and corn-on-the-cob for dinner and were treated to a no-light-pollution celestial show (while laying flat on the concrete slab of the RV site) that included the brightest shooting star any of us had ever seen. Booker, an emerging 5th grader, made the best joke of the night. Let me give you a little context: he is constantly captivating our aged minds with the scientific trivia he acquires in post-millennial grade school and (even more likely) YouTube. So when he said “Guys…Do you know that if you stretched all the veins in your body around the circumference of the earth…” , we elders listened intently, waiting for the newly discovered factoid illuminating the marvel that is the human body. Following a dramatic pause, he finished the sentence……”that you would die?” We literally rolled around on the ground laughing, he got us so good.
The next morning , we made the scorching hike from the campground to the “Shut-ins” (named so for the way the volcanic rock formations create pools and a labyrinth of twists and turns between boulders). I got my monkey on, jumping and climbing and exploring and splashing in the clear, cool rapids as young visitors kept their distance with quizzical glares that asked “What is up with this crazy, grizzled old man jumping around like some feral cave-boy?” The place was as spectacular and as fun as we had hoped, and by 3pm we were knackered silly. We took cold-water showers to cool down, made dinner and went to bed early to recharge for tomorrow’s drive to Lawrence, Kansas, where I will need to do some laundry after sweating through four of my seven packed T-shirts in one day today.