…they’re not very specific, but their rituals are cool
Critter Con 14
The Trip Home Day 3: In which we take the back way home and get to attend a hippie party along the way.
The last leg of our trip home started at 8:00 this morning, with all of us bleary eyed and only about half awake. Thankfully, strong caffeinated beverages and a light breakfast brought us to almost total wakefulness as we headed for Death Valley.
Having been through Death Valley more than once, we decided to avoid the hellish heat and just watch the terrain fly by at 110 miles an hour. Yes, we were speeding, but this would be an 11 hour trip otherwise, not counting stops. As it is, given our cloaking abilities, we should do it in about 7.5 hours.
As we sped through the desert, we played a couple of games of Dominion and watched videos of the grandkids from our trip in 2019. They were so cute!
At Mono Lake, we stopped at the town of Lee Vining to get some fresh air. A genuine hippie van pulled up next to us and a half dozen hippies my age and older got out. They approached us and introductions were made. Then, they asked us if we were going to the big gathering up in Yosemite. Since we were going to drive through there anyway, we said sure, what the hell.
A couple more vehicles, including a converted full sized bus, pulled up and more old, and not so old, hippies got out. They all marveled at Sweetie’s tie dye paint job, mostly because it slowly changes colors and patterns. After a while of talking and declining offers of weed and wine, we got back on the bus and became part of the caravan headed to Tuolomne Meadows.
Despite hot weather and smoke in the air from fires 75 miles to the north, there were probably 1,000 hippies camping in the campsites and other areas. The smoke from weed was equal to the smoke from wildfires.
We wandered around for a couple of hours, looking at various arts & crafts, listening to music from the Summer of Love, talking to people, and dancing. It was lots of fun and we all ended up lightly baked because we could not resist offers of double chocolate brownies.
Back on the Bus, Grace told Sasha to shoot us up with Nanite Detoxers, while I told Data that we needed to make up more lost time. I hit the shrink button and took us down to the size of an RC car. Then Data took us up to 150 miles an hour and we did not slow down until we got to Stockton.
It was like something out of an Ant Man movie.
But now we are home. Sweetie is in the DocCave garage, Grace, Sasha & Sam are all napping, and I’m soon to nap, too.
Another fun con trip and con is history. I hope you enjoyed the report.
Doc out.
Critter Con 14
is over.
but we will be back next year for…
Critter Con 15
(Expect a bigass celebration)
NOTE FROM JUNE 12, 2024: As it turned out, Sasha died in January of 2022. We adopted Yoyo, then Duke, but after a couple of entries, I realized I could not do the rest of it. It was just too painful and a reminder of an era gone by. Still can’t do a full report, although there will be a much shorter, critters only report this August. Pretty sure it will be the last CritterCon report, but you never know.
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