And I found myself sitting on two (one neon yellow and one neon pink) four dollar intertubes around a fire ring with no fire in it, humming absentmindedly along with "Funky Town," staring at a grey golf cart with flames on it with the inscription "It's Ducky Time!" written along the back end, in a place called Little Mexico, wondering how I got myself here.
We Parks like our little share of the country. We'll go camping every couple times a summer and have rootin'-tootin' good time. Little Mexico, however, is one experience that I will never duplicate. The place is is central PA, ok? The first thing you see when you pull onto Little Mexico Road (oh no, I'm not kidding, that's the road's real name) is a huge pen with, I'm not even joking, two emu/ostrich type things and a bull or a bison with huge horns (no one knew what it was) right next to a huge buchering store. Ironic, no? Other than that, the place looks pretty average, a lot of happy campers out for a long Memorial Day weekend with very limited technology (I was tethered to my cell phone with no bars hoping for reception the entire time) but they're ok with that.
The real charm of Little Mexico lies not with the bison, or emu, or even the sheep which look like they haven't been shaved for over a year which baa back if you baa at it (yeah, I was really bored.), but with what I shall lovingly call the Beerbelly-Mullet-Redneck-Die-Hard-Horseshoe Competition. As I sorta mentioned, there is very little to do while camping, other than rafting down the river in four dollar intertubes and walking back (which I did for about an hour), eating, sit by the fire, play Pinocle, play Sequence, eat more, and clean up. Needless to say, me and Aimee were super-bored (see sheep comment...), so when my dad and Steve, the other family's dad, whos family we were camping with, went to participate in a horseshoe tornament, we went over to cheer them on.
There were eleven teams of two and spectators (I never thought I'd see the day when there were two horseshoe pits with freaking bleachers next to it so people could watch. But I did. My dad's team was #9 so we had to wait a while. In the waiting time, we were amazed by all the strange assortment of people there. Having a beer belly seemed to be a requisite. Other than that, there was: a dyed mullet, an old man wearing a Confederate flag hat (central PA, people, it seemed weird to me), many shirtless guys, all with beer bellies, of course, and all were rednecks. Now, I'm not trying to be mean, because they were nice, except when we cheered for my dad and Steve because no one else was cheering for anyone they told us we were too loud...or maybe they were just annoyed because my dad and Steve were winning. Either way, it was a strange assortment of people. So we sat there for three hours, watching as my dad and Steve played a total of three games, and in the meantime, went for many a B-double E-double R-U-N, beerrun. In total, we figured that we brought my dad eight beers, while we brought Steve 12 (he was on his 7th when we started bringing him some. Then other people gave him some, and once the competition was done he had more. We thought he had somewhere between 20-30 beers. He was pretty smashed.)
So after the three hours of sitting out in 80 degree weather, me and Aimee were really burnt. So we demanded money for being faithful cheerleaders so we could go to Rita's. Being as we were the only ones with a licence who wasn't totally smashed, we were sent on various other errands too. When we got back, fully five hours after the competition started, we were told that the men just finished. They came in second and got nothin'. If they had won, they would have gotten a grand total of $24. Steve had nearly drank more beers than that.
Other than that, most of the weekend consisted of drunk adults (my dad actually said to Aimee,while playing a card game, who was jumping around because she was going to win, "Calm down! What are you doing, about to orgasm?" Yeah, that was good.), card games, bug bites, and being just all-around gross. Actually, more things did happen, like the time when I was getting out of the river from laying in my intertube for a long time into knee-high sinking mud where I lost a flip-flip. But that's a different story for a different time.
(P.S. I think I've made a record for having a blog this long and not making an entry...)
