In our efforts to salvage our summer (because my Ireland trip occupies the family's favorite time to travel), we decided to grant my brother's wish to go quadding at Beverly, Washington, on the eastern side of Washington. Yesterday, a Saturday, we spent much of the morning cleaning and inventorying our trailer's contents. It was not too laborious, but every piece of fabric in the place was musty and moldy smelling, and literally every food product we had been saving was expired -- the most out of date was expired in 2007, good God.
Aspen woke me about 8:30, quite excited to get going. We fairly well packed up, and were abruptly stalled by the fact that our water filter had exploded over the winter with the freezing and thawing. Apparently it's a trailer right of passage to blow some pipes because you didn't winterize correctly. One quick trip to Walmart and a non-fitting filter later, we decided that there can't be anything too bad in that water tank, we'll risk it. We also brought a few gallon jugs of our emergency water for drinking.
Beverly, if you don't know, is a little desert town on the east side of the Columbia river off of I-90. It is truly a bleak and dry, hot drive-by town. By the time we arrived, about 12:30, and were all appropriately starving to death, we discovered that in our fridge, which was supposed to be stocked with sandwich supplies collected by Aspen, there was mayonnaise, mustard, turkey, cheese, and no bread. Not in any cabinet or drawer. Aspen, you had ONE JOB.
So mom and I jumped in the truck and headed into town. And by town I mean the 76 station. That's all there was, and we passed a mobile home with tires holding down the roof to get there. Inside, we found the bread aisle, which contained white wonderbread (the new brand name is now Bimbo bread. One can only guess what that means in Spanish), or wheat. We also found a delightful array of the strangest Mexican foods and products. One was the Beerichirada, a styrafoam cup with a rim coated in spices, with some kind of powder inside. The instructions said to add two beers without stirring, and when you've drank about 3/4, you add another beer. It is also delightful with your favorite tropical juice drink, for a non-alcoholic beerichirida. There were also curritos, a corn flour snack, whose first ingredient was wheat flour.
There was an entire table top of space devoted to galletas y pastaletas (?) which were bags of giant cookies and what looked like scones. Slices of cake, with frosting and sprinkles, were also put into bags, so that they were stacked on top of each other and some of the bags were lying on their sides. Of all the ways to display and distribute pieces of cake.
I do have a soft spot for Hellado, Mexican fruit flavored popcicles, and I grabbed a coconut one, and the lady behind the counter recommended that mom get a pecan flavored one. The Spanish word for pecan is nuez, with an accent over the e. I didn't know they had pecans in Mexico. We told the ice cream story to the clerk, about my eating ice cream off the floor, which everyone does seem to enjoy.
We head back with our popcicles and our Bimbo bread, and some donuts because that's what one buys when one is at a convenience store, and we headed back. The boys had set out, and left the dogs in the trailer, and they were none too happy to have been so unceremoniously stuffed in the trailer. Mom and I let them out, ate our popcicles, and tried to have a good time. The landscape is stark in a very desert sort of way, and the buttes and dusty green trees are kind of pretty when they sway in the breeze. We made little sandwiches (I made the most shameful star of mustard on mom's sandwich that anyone has ever seen...) and went to go sit outside and look for the boys.
Literally in our hands, the bread turned dry. By the end of our sandwich eating, we were actually eating croutons. I felt as moist soft bread, the kind I love because it sticks to the roof of my mouth while I'm trying to eat, and I secretly always loved it because my mom always bought good bread that had actual nutritional content, I felt that bread dying in my hands. If the bread can't withstand the dryness, what chance did mom and I have??
Mom had a minor panic attack about the ants that were crawling on her feet, and no one seemed to appreciate the heat. I looked out, and saw the leaves of the tree that was shading us beginning to move, and I hoped for the sweet caress of a cool breeze, and it was exactly as hot as the stagnant air, and I made a horrible gutteral "Uuuuggghhh." noise. Mom and I cracked up because it was honestly that bad. I don't mean to be a horrible person, but I hated it there.
We tried to be brave in the heat, and the boys came back from riding (we warned them about the instant drying bread). They drank an entire gallon of Gatorade between themselves, and Aspen finished both mom and my cokes. When they headed back out, mom and I decided to be sad, sad people and put on the air conditioner and hid from the heat. It was shocking how much more comfortable it was in a 75 degree room than in the 90 something hot hot heat. The dogs eventually laid down and stopped panting, and we gave them so much water it's not even funny. They also drank a gallon of water between the three of them upon our arrival.
Mom and I tried to talk a walk and look for a river to put our feet in when the boys got back the second time. We brought the dogs, who found a nice dirty chest-deep puddle to go frolic in, and the boys rescued us from the march back in the sand. An exploratory search around on the quads yielded no water source, but it made it abundantly clear how poor Brodie's health is getting. The poor old girl was proverbially dogging it, and her left back leg didn't look like it was working in tandem with the right as well as it used to. She was too proud/skittish to get on the quad with me and Aspen, so she ran back, but she was very very thankful for the cool trailer to rest in.
Mom took an adorably slow crawl across the dunes, and I took my turn to creep along over the sand. I followed Aspen fairly well, and tried to do cool things, but backed out of the toilet bowl thing that angled so steeply up the side. I wouldn't say I chickened out, but I certainly didn't go on it either.
Eventually around 5:30 we all decided that it was too impossibly hot to enjoy anymore time out, and packed up to go home. Stop at the Carl's Jr. for dinner, and of everyone's food to be forgotten, mom had to go back to fetch her supper. We plowed home, listened to dad's iPod shuffle, and were home before it was very dark.
Post-Script: Aspen got prickly heat from wearing his silkscreen shirt in the hot heat, and his chest was covered in little red bumps in the morning, so mom took him to the doctor. He's fine, he's just a delicate little baby.
