French Fries, Vodka, and the occasional Potato Barge

At least going to Belarus, you don't have to transfer planes out in the boonies. No, you are already going TO the boonies, no transfer needed. After flying all night you just get off the plane, look around, feel that little tingle in the hairs on the back of your neck (the ones I call "danger hairs"), hold your backpack a little tighter and move your wallet to your front pocket. "C'est la vie", as the French would say, "let's get this show on the road." Well, the show on the road part comes from Ol' Ray. But Ol' Ray eats a lot of French Fries, even when the squawking heads were all asunder and calling for their renaming to Freedom Fries. Ol' Ray gets none too concerned with the day to day workings of the world.

I had gone for the diving. The discounted discount travel dude told me that this was the best time for Belarus diving, and we'd be leaving by van from Minsk, and can I have payment in full now...in cash? Tip me off? It should have. But it didn't.

So, after having had to fight a rather surly badger for my snorkle and swim fins because she, for some reason, had adopted them as some sort of weird, plastic badger child of her own (I'm not even going to try to Dr. Phil that one), I get to Minsk and realize, "This is a freakin' land locked country!"

And another thing. Exactly how does one get a wild, surly badger in their garage in Florida? Must have stowed on one of them dang RVs with Wisconsin plates, as near as I can figure.

So I mull my options. The rivers are large but not particularly clean. And they are rife with commercial traffic. Commercial traffic, of course, meaning big boats loaded with scrap metal and building materials and potatos. Do I want to be run over by a potato barge, marginally piloted by a drunken, beligerant bear of a man? Do I? Well, no. That's really not too hard to answer.

There are 11,ooo lakes there. But many are too small fo diving. Fishing? Yeah, buddy, just point me to the jon boat. But not for diving. And the few lakes that are large enough are more or less contaminated with fallout from 1986 nuclear reactor accident at Chornobyl, which has left them with a somewhat gelatinous consistency that makes trying to swim feel like some kind of Roger Corman B grade Sci-Fi flick, but without the busty gal that runs around naked and screaming a lot only to eventually meet her demise in a fangoriously bloody beach scene. None too pleasant (the gelatinous lake,not the bloody beach scene) and not at all suited for diving, let me assure you.

Now I used to be a linebacker in Pee Wee football. I credit it quite a lot with making me the man that I am today. And I, of course, mean my patience and demeanor and not my lack of mastery of world geography. We do need to be clear on that. So are we? Good.

When faced with any dilema, be it crazy badger moms , landlocked diving destinations, or just an everyday problem such as whether to pick up the kids at school or let them figure out that they're gonna need to start walking if they want to be home for dinner, I just stop and ask myself, "What would Linebacker Eddie do?" (Ed note- WWLED bracelets will soon be available)

In this case, the answer offered me nothing that I saw as viable. I just could not see how doing a face plant in cold, hard turf, in front of dozens of jeering suburban football moms, wearing a helmet 3 sizes too large for my peanut shaped head was going to help me here, far away across the Atlantic, in a strange and sullen land.

And that, my friends, is where we stop for today. Tune in tommorrow to learn how this ends. What you will actually learn is that I have no intentions of ever completeing this, but tune in anyway. There will be something.

And thank you all. This completes my attempt at Improv Blogging. It is fun. It seems to make for an entertaining read. But omigosh, it is quite the laborious process. I don't think I could do it every day. However, it has gone a long way towards proving what I have told you for years. Ramblin' Ed cares about YOU.

Putting angle in the dangle, out
Ramblin' Ed