This is Chris posing next to his extremely fast car at Giant City State Park, where we went hiking yesterday. It was a real treat to get to hang out in Carbondale with someone whom I have been friends with since I was 13. True to form for us, we bought some cold Sam Adams Summer Ale last night -- and then just made French press coffee instead. Two of the beers blew up in the freezer, though, which is true to form for me. We had two -- count 'em, two -- great breakfasts at the new Panera Bread in Carbondale, the place I have missed ever since moving away from Massachsetts almost a year ago. It was also very nice to go hiking with Chris, especially since we were in Boy Scouts together as teenagers (that's actually how we met). We used to stay up all night talking about everything in the world on camping trips. We did that so much one year at summer camp that we needed 64 once cups of coffee in the mornings to get going. Yes, that's a half of a gallon of coffee -- not to mention the copious amounts of sugar and powdered creamer. We were bad enough to smoke on camping trips: cigarettes and other things. We even drank a bottle of expensive red wine on one camp-out when we were both seventeen and waxed philosophical in the mountains of Western Maryland. Sitting in downtown [sic!] Carbondale after a nice hike, chugging and sipping huge coffees at a nice coffeeshop is pretty much the best way to spend a June Saturday wherein a life-long friend is in town for only one day. Lucky for me, Chris lives in Florida, now, which is a whole world closer than where he had been living for a few years, i.e., Sicily. I'm sure that we'll both end up in Maryland again one day, as the leaders of our old Boy Scout troop, trying to catch the kids doing the bad things we used to do, wondering how the hell we turned out so sane and "with it" after the trouble we used to get into.
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