Happy September, everyone!

The basil plant did well, which didn’t surprise me, because it’s about the easiest-growing plant I’ve ever tried to grow. I’ve had a few of them over the years, and this one, like the others, provides us with plenty of good pesto and seasonings.

The bell pepper and the jalapeno, despite regular watering and careful sun/shade placement, shriveled up in the heat and died almost immediately. Our bell pepper had time to make us a cute little tiny pepper before it succumbed, but that was it.

Our watermelon ate our whole garden.

Basically every green thing you see in that picture up there, besides the tall purple flowers, is that one tiny watermelon plant. At first I tried to keep it tidy, but eventually I just let it go, and it spread out along the whole flower bed, out across the patio, and it is now trying to eat our patio furniture. Soon, I am sure it will try to enter the house and eat Mike and I while we are sleeping.

The vine is full of little yellow flowers, and is constantly buzzing with bees who are, presumably, pollinating it.

Unfortunately, despite months of hard work, this is the biggest watermelon we have so far.

What have we done wrong, here on our watermelon farm? Is it the sort of plant that will expend all it’s energy producing leaves and vines and run out of strength to make fruit unless you prune it? Is it just getting ready, preparing to unload thousands of fruits upon our unprepared kitchen, turning us into the sort of people who must go door-to-door and pathetically beg strangers to take some of our watermelon away from us? I have no idea. I feel very ignorant on the whole subject.

The great irony here is the fact that I despise watermelon. I hate all melons, actually. I eat cantaloupe and honeydew regularly, because people always have such wonderful things to say about them that I can’t give up trying, hoping that one day I’ll experience their legendary sweetness. I have still not had one that did not taste mostly like soap to me. The cilantro of the fruit world (and I learned to like cilantro, so I keep choking back those cantaloupes and honeydews from time to time, hoping things will change). Watermelon is such an integral part of the summer season that I cannot allow a fourth of July barbecue or an instance of frying chicken pass without eating part of one, but watermelon is worse even than the other melons. Can I really be experiencing summer without enjoying a juicy watermelon? To me, they taste like sucking on a sponge that has been lightly soaked with Windex. Once, I heavily doused a slice with salt, and it was pretty edible. But that was just the one time.

Mike loves watermelon. That is why we have it. He is a man of few favorite foods, and he has been carefully tending this plant over the past few months. If it never produces any edible fruit, we will both feel quite disappointed.

Of course, if it produces thousands of fruits, get ready, because if you know me well enough to be reading this, you will be targeted in our excess fruit distribution program, set to begin in a few weeks. WE HOPE.

Sydney belonged to our good friends, Kevin and Kelly. She was about a year and a half old, and as dogs go, she was a great one.

They brought their dog everywhere she was welcome– to all of our house parties, and up to Hiawassee with us, and almost every gathering at friends’ houses. We hung out just last night. Sydney and Kelly and I were just three ladies hanging out on the floor of Jeff’s house, totally disinterested in, yet present for, the men’s fantasy football draft last night. I was imagining how awesome it was going to be when Mike and I get our own dog someday. And how our dog and Sydney would totally be best dog-friends.

I did like that dog a whole lot, and her abrupt death is very sad, but I mostly feel sad for my poor friends.

The world seems like a very cruel place today.

A Dog Has Died

by Pablo Neruda

If you recall, we have arrived at Grand Teton National Park! This park is so named because (possibly), French trappers, roaming the wilderness for ages without encountering anyone but their trapper companions, started seeing boobs everywhere. I personally didn’t see it.

We had at last come out of the desert, and found ourselves among lakes, trees, flowers, and green things everywhere.

We camped at Jenny Lake Campground, and on our first day, we spent the whole day hiking the circumference of Jenny Lake, about eleven miles.

Yes, I hike in a dress.

It was dusk by the time we got back to the campsite.

On our second day in the park, we took part in one of my all-time favorite activities: seeing old houses and things!
This is Cunningham Cabin, one of two houses we visited.

We also went to a reproduction general store, where the shopkeeper was baking gingersnaps to give away on an iron stove, and I bought a reprint of one of the 19th century’s most famous cooking/home books (The American Frugal Housewife by Lydia Marie Child!), though I wanted to buy most everything in the store.

The prettiest historic building we went to was this church, which is still in use in the park today.

Don’t you wish your church had this kind of view behind the altar?

And that was Grand Teton. I really loved it there. But we had to move on, because we had hotel reservations to meet at our final destination: Yellowstone!

Tomorrow is the big First Day, and I can’t think too much about it right now, or else I’ll become too nervous, but I am guessing that probably this week some time, I’ll finish the trip updates, and probably also tell you all about my new job. Until then, if you want to see something new and exciting on this blog, check out my new layout, courtesy of my private web designer, Mike. He took out the sidebar that used to be on the right side of the page, and replaced it with tabs just below the header image. The pictures in my posts are bigger now, thanks to this. Also, if you use Windows, the titles of my posts are now in the same fun cursive font that the header image is in. (But if you have a Mac, this is not the case right now. I don’t know how to fix this, though: I just announce things to Mike, and then one day they have magically been repaired!)

Okay, so that explains the lack of posting– wish me luck tomorrow! Yikes!

Adrienne and I were not cool in high school. I don’t know if we were the biggest nerds in school, but we were surely not far back in the race. We were not bastions of self-confidence, and perhaps needed work in the social skills department, and our fashion choices were legendarily bad. (For example, during senior year, we had a day called Chaucer Day wherein we were supposed to all dress like we lived in Chaucer’s time, and I just wore my normal clothes that I wore all the time, and also I had one friend borrow some more of my normal clothes, and we both were appropriately costumed for the day.)

Anyway, as the past decade has gone on, Adrienne and I have transformed from  insecure dorks to self-confident, better-dressed women who embrace our true inner selves, inner selves that are still big dorks–because you can’t escape who you really are.

Adrienne and I made lots of exciting plans for her trip, but the inevitable Florida thunderstorms canceled most of them. We had fun anyway, though. On Monday night, we went to ’80s Night at The Castle, which is a dance club down in Ybor City. We are not a part of the usual Castle subculture, but we were interested in music that was not horrible, as it often is at dance clubs, so we went.

While we were there, we ran into Amber, who Mike used to date way back in the day, and who now is an internet celebrity. I learned that she is a reader of this blog, which I found very flattering, since her blog has a readership of like, ten thousand, and my blog has a readership of maybe ten.

So, we hung out and chatted some, and then Adrienne and I did a lot of dancing. We are very passionate about our dancing, we love to do it, but we are not what you would call GOOD dancers, unless you were mistaking our enthusiasm for skill.
Actually, I think that we ARE good dancers, but we are taking dancing back to it’s primal origins of expressing enjoyment for music, and disregarding the current purpose, which is to publicly dry hump strangers.

After our night of dancing was finished, we realized that we could not safely transport ourselves home on our own, so Mike generously drove down to Ybor to pick our drunk butts up at 3am. To show our appreciation, we made him a pineapple upside down cake, which is his favorite.

Later on in the trip, we went to a birthday party for my good pal Anthony, who was turning 29.

This time, it was our turn to be designated driver for Mike.

And we did many other things during Adrienne’s visit– we had a living room Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons dance party, we tried out the Grass Root organic restaurant in town (very good, but expensive!),we watched movies, we went to the paradise that is Haslam’s Book Store, and just generally caught up on Emily and Adrienne time, which happens infrequently these days, now that Adrienne lives in Virginia.

Now, we both have to return to the depressing drudgery of being recent graduates applying for jobs during a recession. But it was fun while it lasted, and I am already looking forward to the next time.

Coming soon: the continuation of the National Parks Trip story. Two parks left!

I will get back to you afterwards!

For one thing, we had a great campsite. It was up on a hill, from which you could see great sunsets.

We didn’t have to use bear lockers here, probably because the hundreds of adorable little chipmunks and ground squirrels were keeping the bigger animals in line.

It was hot, but not as painfully hot as Zion had been. For the first time on the trip, it wasn’t freezing cold at night. It was still dry and dusty, but there were lots of trees and plants, too.

We spent one night and two days in the park. On our first day, we all hiked down into the canyon on the Fairyland Trail.

Did you notice how my mom’s outfit matches the landscape? I can never live up to that kind of fashion example.

The canyon and it’s surrounding areas are full of tall spires of rock, called hoodoos, that remain when the surrounding rocks have been worn down. They create the most spectacular landscapes! I thought they looked like little far-off cities, or ancient statues.

Many of them have been named after something they supposedly resemble, like bottles of beer or naked ladies or, in this case, a tower bridge.

Though the trail we were on promised to reach the tower bridge rock formation in 1.5 miles, the sign lied (it was more like two and a half, I think), and I confess that I never actually made it there. My mom and I hiked for about two miles, and then hiked back and lounged around our campsite reading books and making quesadillas for dinner while my dad and Greg continued on for a few more hours. That evening, we all hung around the campsite, eating and playing cards. We went to bed early, so that we could wake up early and go horseback riding!

Actually, it was muleback riding, and only Greg and I went. My mom has permanently and vehemently sworn off riding any kind of horse or horse-like animal, because one time she and my dad went horseback riding and, I don’t know the whole story exactly, but it ends with my mom making a big scene and abandoning her horse and walking home on foot, so she is never doing THAT again, and neither is my dad, because they are married and that is the law.

But anyway, Greg and I went!

My mule’s name was Dixie, but her name should have been, “Gassiest Horse On The Trail,” which was fine with me, but was not so great for Greg, who was riding right behind me and had to absorb the full brunt of Dixie’s symphonic digestion. We traveled through a different part of the canyon than we’d hiked the day before, and this time, we were seeing the canyon from the backs of animals who preferred to walk so close to the edge of the winding, steep trail that you couldn’t see ground beneath you, just lots of air and the canyon floor below. It was a bit like flying through the place! It was pretty cool, but I decided horses and mules are not my preferred method of transportation. The whole ride seemed designed to painfully resurface all of my vital organs (the side saddle was not invented just to accommodate wearing a dress, I suspect), plus it was very slow. Maybe if I became friends with a horse, and it was a companion of mine rather than being more like a bored, equine taxi, I could become a horseback riding enthusiast.

When Greg and I finished our ride, we met up with our parents, who had packed up the campsite, and were ready to drive on to Grand Teton National Park. It would take the whole rest of the day to drive there, and we stayed at a hotel that night.

I was having a great time on the trip, but Bryce Canyon was a turning point for me, because it was then that I really started to miss Mike.

“Miss” is not really the word, it was more like constant, all-over inner body aches. I felt like I hadn’t seen my friends, my family, my home, or anything comfortable and familiar for months, which didn’t make sense, because my family was there with me and I had only been gone for a week. At first I just felt kind of out-of-sorts, but before long I just always felt tired and worn out, no matter how much sleep I got. I have never experienced anything quite like it before. It started off here in Bryce Canyon as just a restless feeling that wouldn’t go away, and by the time we were in Yellowstone, I had to constantly fight the urge to just crawl into my bed and sleep all day so that I wouldn’t have to pass any more time away from him, no matter how many cool things we were seeing (and we were seeing some COOL things, just wait for the Yellowstone posts!). It was horrible!

I just can’t figure out what the deal is with this guy.

Coming up next: Grand Teton, our most pervertedly named national treasure!

Once we got closer to the canyons, the ground began to turn darker and rise up around us. Small prickly plants grew up and then turned into low, gnarled trees. When we arrived at Zion, we were surrounded by walls of soft stone, red and pink and brown, that were layered like the pages of a book.

It was also very, very hot. Not only hot, but so dry and still that it was suffocating. We walked around the park’s visitor center for a bit, but without the enthusiasm that had struck us at other parks. Finally, Greg and my dad decided that they would go for a short hike, and my mom and I decided to drive back to a town we’d passed on the way in and go shopping at the many cute gift shops we had passed.

It was an excellent idea. I like to hike, but I love to shop.

When the men folks returned from their hiking trip, we decided to explore the park by car. After all, we’d be headed to the not terribly distant and geographically similar Bryce Canyon that evening, so there was no need to feel obligated to wander around and swelter.

A common experience on our trip was having to wait on the road for ten or twenty minutes at spots where construction was being done and the road had been blocked off into one lane. With the rugged terrain we drove over, it seemed no wonder that the roads would need to be re-graded and re-paved frequently. It was no problem to have to sit in the car and wait for opposing traffic to go by, because we’d usually just get out and look around. Very few cars even came from the other direction at most places.

The rocks were so soft that you could easily break pieces off with your fingers and use them as chalk. When dropped from any height, they would explode into dust the moment they hit the ground. Yet, the entire canyon was made from this fragile substance. The whole place is always shifting and changing, as a result of wind and water cutting across the soft rocks.

Part of the road drives right through the side of the canyon. This tunnel was built in the 1930s, I believe, and it had several holes cut into the walls so that drivers could see out into the canyon as they drove through it.

It was here in the rocky, dry terrain of Zion where our conversations amongst ourselves became 95% comprised of Blazing Saddles quotes. Particularly, the first scene.

“Come on, boys! The way you’re lollygagging around here with them picks and them shovels, you’d think it was a hundred and twenty degrees! Can’t be more than a hundred and fourteen!”

This continued pretty much for the remainder of the entire vacation, except that when we returned to a greener, cooler climate, we focused more upon the indoor scenes of the movie.

We left Zion that evening, pledging to return during the winter next time, and traveled to the outskirts of Bryce Canyon National Park, hoping to get a hotel room just outside the entrance and then find a campsite early the next morning. Unfortunately, every hotel room near the park was completely booked. We ended up driving halfway back to Zion, where we got a room at the somewhat sketchy-looking Harold’s Place Inn. When we got there, my parents were greeted by Harold’s daughter, wearing her bathrobe and slippers. We were given our own private cabin, one of about a dozen that appeared to have been recently built on the property.

Let me tell you, that was the cutest, quaintest little random independent hotel I have ever stayed in. If you ever find yourself on a deserted road in Utah in the middle of the night and need a place to stay, I highly recommend Harold’s Place.

We also ate dinner at the nearby Thunderbird Restaurant, “Home of the Ho-Made Pies,” which was delicious. The pie was good, but the homemade bread and rolls were a thousand times better. They were so good that I had two bites of pie and then decided to just eat a lot more bread for dessert instead.

So that was our brief trip to Zion! Up next, of course, is Bryce Canyon!

If you have ever veered slightly onto the shoulder of a highway, you get the concept of the musical road: The rumble strip on the edge of the highway creates a loud buzzing sound when you drive over it. The idea of the musical road is that, by spacing the bumps or grooves of the rumble strip closer together or farther apart, or by making deeper or shallower grooves, they will create a higher or lower pitched buzzing sound. If you arranged several different “notes” of rumble stripping in sequence, the road will play a song when you drive over it!

Well, so Honda decided to build a musical road as an advertising gimmick for the Honda Civic. It played part the William Tell Overture. The road appeared in some commercials, at which point it became a popular tourist destination. Well, maybe not “popular” in the global sense, but popular enough that the residents of Lancaster became annoyed by the increase in traffic, plus the fact that they all had to listen to the William Tell Overture about a thousand times a day. So, the musical highway was paved over.

Not long after, the residents of Lancaster realized that they had done a terrible thing! They had it re-built (but this time, it was put way out of town, so that they wouldn’t have to listen to it all the time).

Before leaving on our National Parks trip, we each made known any particular sights that we just absolutely did not want to miss while we were out West. This musical highway was my brother’s selection.  Lancaster was not really near our planned route between parks, but we all agreed that this seemed like such a weird and wonderful thing that we could not allow ourselves to pass it by. So we went! We had no idea what to expect, but we were excited.

Here is a video of our very first musical highway experience. (The video only cuts off the first second or two of the song.)

As you can see, the musical highway is perhaps not the symphonic masterpiece that the original Overture was. We made four trips over it at varying speeds from 30 to 70 miles per hour, and documented all of them. I won’t ask you to listen to every one, but here is the one with the best sound– our fastest trip.

Ultimately, I think that the Musical Highway is one of the strangest and most delightful roadside (road-on?) attractions I have ever experienced. It was bafflingly imperfect (would it really be that difficult to make the song play in tune?) but it was also charming and novel, and I am glad that we took the side trip. And if I ever have access to any kind of road paving machinery and an unused stretch of highway, I am going to experiment with this whole musical highway business, because I feel certain that, with practice, I could create some much cooler-sounding songs.