About Jude. Also, Florence is a vacuum.

Jude is a sweetheart, and I feel the need to chronicle it here. She shared her campsite with us, including her firewood and her vodka. She gave us several cigarettes. She let me borrow her phone to call home when she learned that I missed Maci. She let us stay the second night with her for free. She bought us a box of tacos. She moved our stuff, including broken bike, to hiker-biker camping. She gave us her leftover box of firewood. She drove us to town, stopped at the 7/11 to look up bike shops, drove us to the bank, and dropped us off at the library. She offered to show us around Florence and the dunes and the casino, although we never did any. She gave us her address and phone number so that we could let her know if we were ever in her area. Jude, you're a sweetheart.

Florence.

It's Tuesday afternoon. We got here on Friday afternoon. Plan was to leave today, but the new fork got left out of the shipment to the bike shop, so we have to stay til tomorrow. Bike... her frame is bent, and the fork's shot. New fork, and dealing with the bent frame. It'll mean I go a little slower and -really- watch out with my new super-fast steering. My knee is a nice purple, but it's feeling a lot better. In other news, I have 26 bug bites on the outside of my right calf. No idea how many are elsewhere... I just counted the most concentrated region. I have a lot, though. It's because I'm so sweet....? All bugs love me. I'm like the sin of bug world.. attractive and delicious, and most often you get away with it when you take a bite, but sometimes you're discovered and fucking SMASHED. Death to all bugs I find near me.

Yesterday when we were walking back to camp, I thought I saw a butterfly on the road. It landed and turned into a grasshopper! Of course I had to startle it to show Miah... ya. Thing flew off, and under its croaky little lifeless grasshopper shell it had these startling blue-green wings with a yellow stripe across them. Lovely.

We ate a pound of turkey last night, mashed with an egg, ginger, sage, cayenne, and salt, and deepfried in italian salad dressing.

Can't think of much else interesting, except that the 4 miles between camp and town is magically getting shorter every day.

At this point we don't know if we'll make it to the redwoods in time for our anniversary as planned, but we will still go there. Then we're going to push like crazy and get to Denver by the end of October :)

Send me emails. I have one, you know... I feel like an information vomit machine, and those things run on different information. Gotta know what's going on with other people.