27 June 2012

Sterling KS 0 miles (TransAm 1,851)

Dear Mom,

Do not look at the photos in this blog. What you don’t want to see isn’t real, but you probably still don’t want to see it.

Love,
Dena

This is the letter I need to email my Mom before she reads this blog. You see, this blog includes a snake and my mother LOATHES snakes. If the disgust Gina and I feel for Harry the Huntsman spider is, on a scale of one to ten, a solid ten, then the hate my mother feels for snakes is at least a 29. She has good reason to find snakes not to her liking, having grown up in southern Indiana where those big, black monsters grow several feet long and like to eat your chickens’ eggs. And imagine if you are a child, running down to the cellar to fetch that jar of preserves, and when you stiff-arm that cellar door at full speed, your motion dislodges a dozing snake from the top of that door, and that demon serpent falls from its perch, draping itself across your outstretched arm, well, you might detest snakes too.

So snakes are not a laughing matter in my family unless you’re 14 years old and Mom is out sunning herself in the yard on a chaise lounge and suddenly starts yelling like her hair’s on fire and you run outside to see her paralyzed with fear, curled up on her chaise screaming nonsense about hoes and garden hoses, with the ittiest of bittiest garden variety snakes eyeing her from 4 feet away. And this is only funny because you’re 14 and you don’t know any better.

But in today’s story, the snake you’re about to see is a laughing matter, a gift from Simon to Gina:

Gina, whose love of snakes is about equal to her love of Australian spiders, is taking a healthy approach to overcoming her own fear of these detestable reptiles, deciding that this snake will come along for the ride:

Her theory is that the presence of this snake will keep others away. My theory is that she has not been reading enough woo-woo books. Ever hear of the Law of Attraction? I told her to let me know how it all works out.

Meanwhile, since it’s a layover day and Team TransAm is busy doing not much more than their laundry and playing a few practical jokes, it’s time to check in again on Where In The World Is Gina?

Snaking her way west, I’d say.