Woodstock without the peace . . .

Or the love, or the drugs. Just the mud. Wet, nasty, clingy, clay mud. Nastiest camping trip ever. It must have been raining down in the Cherry Valley area for the past week, because the campground was just soaked when we arrived, and we would have survived, but then it rained some more. Our site was about three inches of clay on top of unconsolidated rock, no drainage whatsoever. Everything we own stinks of wet clay. Oh, we had a good enough time, did the Hall of Fame, went through the Farmers’ Museum, had about 78 little girl breakdowns and mostly enjoyed ourselves. The bugs left us alone, for they couldn’t take the stink. The absolute highlight of the camping trip had to be when my stove and fuel bottle burst into flames. Yeah, that would probably be it. We got it mostly out with a blanket but couldn’t kill the flames on the stove (which still had quite a bit of fuel to burn off), but luckily the guy on the next site — who just happens to also work for me, total coincidence — had a fire extinguisher. So now I’m going to have to tear down my gazillion-dollar camp stove and find a new fuel pump and bottle for it. Hoping it didn’t destroy any gaskets or anything, ’cause we’re going out again in a couple of weeks.

Well, the tent fly nearly coming off the top of the truck on the Thruway takes a close second to the flaming stove incident. Kinda snaked itself out from under the mesh in the storage rack and started working its way out. Woulda been bad. Don’t think I’da hung around to see how that came out.

Oh, Carmen Esposito’s Italian Ice in Cooperstown? Best. Lemon. Ice. Ever!! Real lemon, baby. Zested right in. Unbelievable.