minor catastrophes

 I’m restless lately. Twitchy. Like if I smoked cigarettes I’d buy a pack and scratch this itch. I’ve recently put on an extra five pounds and turns out eating didn’t put “it” to rest, whatever it is.

I generally experience this unnamable something every winter, just not this early in the season. Not good. Cause there’s a whole lot of Montana winter stretching ahead. Usually this mood just means I need something to look forward to, like a road trip, something to shoo the Blah-Blah-Blahs away. Last year my parents sponsored a once-in-a-lifetime trip to BELIZE over Spring Break, so the Blahs never started cackling at me like they are now. Evil buggers.

Shawn just finished school and likely won’t land a permanent teaching position until next September, so money remains tight while he substitute teaches when called and works on remodeling our fixer-upper. So vacation budget is non-existent, except that I came up with this brilliant plan: He and I can make money being human lab rats.

Think drunks on skid-row and college kids donating blood for $20 a visit to the blood bank, and that’s the idea. We have a bioscience lab here that pays $100 for job listings like “Handwash Study” and $200 for “Pre-op Study” which I think involves having your junk shaved and then itching like a plucked chicken for two weeks while it grows back.

Does this embarrass us? Yeah. But I HATE not having an adventure to look forward to. And really, I am well-schooled in the art of the dirtbag trip. I’ve had a lot of fun on them, or at the very least, ended up with a story.

Like the time my Norwegian boyfriend in college and I pooled our money and decided that  $45 was enough to get us from Salt Lake City to San Francisco and back over Spring Break if we rode his motorcycle (a Ninja) and stayed for free with family once there. FYI, a crotch-rocket style bike is a torture device when covering hours of endless highway. San Francisco was great, but the traveling — my back ached like a worn out trucker and I learned what “saddle sore” means since peeing was similar to expelling volcanic fire.

Or the time that same boyfriend and I applied for credit cards advertising free airline tickets and flew to Key West, Florida and slept in the youth hostel and hung out on the beach for about $150. Or the time my ex-husband and I slept in the back of a hatchback car in the parking lot of Grand Targhee ski resort and took “showers” in the public restroom sinks for days. Or two years ago when Shawn and I found “bargain” tickets to New York City and slept behind the ticket counter in Denver airport which would have been dandy except that every 15 minutes, just when we were drifting to sleep, a TSA warning played over the loudspeaker, which sounded something like, “Welcome to Hell, Cheapskates. Normal people pay for cabs and rent rooms between overnight connecting flights.”

Anyway, I need a fix. We’ve been talking about Vancouver, but — and I hate to admit this — I don’t think I can do youth hostels anymore. Drunk kids crashing in the bunk next to us at 2 a.m.? Is there no dignity in finally passing age 40? Yeah, no. I’d rather camp. Shawn and I somehow stumbled upon the fact that neither of us has been to the Grand Canyon. So in May we’re going to backpack a gnarly trail along the North Rim. We’ll probably even pay for a hotel and take a shower somewhere during the trip this time.

The hitch? We can’t do this adventure until May because the top of the Grand can be snowy while the bottom is sweltering, due to the extreme elevation change. So it’s not really doable until the snow melts. May is five months away. If you start smelling cigarettes, you know I’ve cracked.

Deer Creek, one of the North Rim trails in the Grand Canyon. I'm going to let some science lab freaks shave my cooter so I can visit here. If someone wants to nominate me for some sort of "Most Dedicated Traveler" award, that would be fine.