July 16th, 2006
The next night found us in Gatlin Campground in the Land Between the Lakes Recreation Area in Kentucky. We had expected the ride to smooth out a lot, after the nasty hills of TN, but we found the riding to be just as hard and harder in some ways. We quit after only about 40 miles, as we were really tired and again, the heat was getting to us seriously, after a tough morning of hills. The campground had only one water spigot, and chemical toilets, so it was another night without showers. Again, there was only one other campsite occupied, so we had great privacy, and we had a waterfront spot.
We did have one seriously funny incident there. Alex was cooking up some ramen for himself, and under his feet around the picnic table were a number of holes. Upon investigation, we realized that they were holes for some type of particularly nasty looking wasp. They weren’t bothering us, although they were quite nasty looking. So there’s Alex minding his own business cooking up the ramen, when suddenly out of nowhere, something dropped into his soup. It was a grasshopper – very dead! It took a couple of minutes to figure it out while he fished out the grasshopper from the soup, but we found out that a wasp had actually killed the grasshopper and was carrying it back to its home, in those holes in the ground, to eat. The grasshopper was easily the size of the wasp, yet the wasp was carrying it easily, almost like riding its back. It had gotten disoriented by the heat rising, and had dropped its prey! We are still laughing about that – but what an experience to see a wasp stinging and killing something so close to its own body size and then actually flying with it to its home – never mind having wasps burrowing in the ground! One of Alex’s buddies from South Dakota told him that those are killer bees.
One of the things that I remember so much about the Gatlin campground is the memory of how much the heat is getting to us. There is a massive heat wave that is making national headlines, and we are right in the middle of it, with no way to escape unless we find a store and hang out for awhile. We have time when we quit early, but the heat is frying our energy. We have absolutely zero energy to do anything other than the absolute essentials, and I feel on the edge of heat exhaustion all the time. We sweat through cotton shirts during the day, and there’s no chance they will dry at night. They are just as wet in the morning as they were when we took them off the night before. This will be a memory that will stick with us forever.