"I'm a Prickly Pear!"

Look, I was on vacation: I'd heard of it, sure, even used it in a phrase now and then, but I didn't know the effects.  So when the pup came in from the "backyard" she got her morning pets, and immediately I knew something was amiss.  In my morning fog, did I try to pick up some fiberglass that I thought was a breakfast pastry?  This...this doesn't feel good.  It was the prickly pear.  That damn thing in the corner by the fence that I figured she'd have more sense to avoid.

This was solved (salved) and so we drove deeper and deeper into the desert, all the winding not just for joshua trees, but for the elusive "skull rock."  And...so it is.  In the middle of nowhere, we were suddenly in a crowd, our moments only fleeting; like meeting Santa.

I was more than up for an amble amongst rocks, and with the lack of heat I knew that even something that would be classified as a "hike" wouldn't be bad.  And it wasn't, and there were good pictures, but "Ferdinand Magellan Finkel" kept insisting that the trail we were on was a circle.  Legend has it that the Boy Scouts made this decades ago, and she didn't seem fazed that we were going the wrong way at the start: "Isn't this the wrong way?" I asked more than once.  "But it's a circle" she kept saying...over and over...though it sure didn't feel that way.

And, when we got back to the road and didn't see the car, with the sun starting to set, I had to let the snark fly.  And, for a mile or 2, there we walked back to the car (glad we were right about that direction) looking like the saddest hitchhikers around.  One positive of that, though, was for Ol Lightning herself the Big Scoop to declare "I don't wanna go on another hike!"  

So what do you do?  You dive into what town there is...eating way too much at a place called Country Kitchen (no, not THAT Country Kitchen)...an activity that nearly became a daily occurrence because it was so darn good.  Look for more items on the "garden" side of things.  Lately, when out of town, I ask myself "Yeah...but if you HAD to, could you make it here?  Could you deal?"  A handful of days doesn't tell you that, but maybe it's the lack of new experiences the nearly 2 years brought us, I'm more than willing to hang longer.  Well...sometimes, not everywhere.  And I won't name locations.

In the legendary film Leaving Las Vegas, Sera tells Ben she knows of a place "in the desert" and there Ben goes, imbibing past the limit again.  After some hot scenes, Ben tries to walk...into a glass end table.  Sera is immediately concerned, but not Ben: so full of juice, he knows the right response is to laugh.  "Whoops!  Uh oh, I'm a prickly pear!"

Roughly a decade later at a party in Venice, TV's Jonas Anderson found himself in the same state.  The "fun times camera" was out, and there the same thing happened again.  This time a wicker table, so nothing more than a "whoa!" from the rest of the crowd...but then he did it.  Even in the state he was in, he repeated that same quote.  I was nearly on the floor laughing - how did he remember that?  And to say it THEN?  

Me, at Star Pharmacy at 10AM, being a prickly pear wasn't nearly as fun.  Breakfast libations and biscuits and gravy were the other cure for my pain (and waistline, apparently) but as I looked on the horizon, wind howling, we made good through and through.  When in the desert, do as I say: surprises good and bad lurk around the cacti, so keep the drink at hand.