“WE GOT CLOUDS ON OUR YellowSTONE(S)”

Hayley: You know, sometimes there are just those days when you gotta suck it up and go with the flow, roll with the punches…
Frances: Are those like the days when you have to pump 50+ gallons of watery veg out of the bus tanks by hand?
Hayley: I think that’s what I was getting at.
Frances: You know what I say on days like that?
Hayley: What?
Frances: Shucks man. Just Shucks.

‘Shucks’ is the less verbally offensive 5-letter-word that Frances and I have been using when expressing our minor frustrations with life, the universe, and everything (the answer to our frustrations was not 42 however).
Explain, you say.
Tell me more, you plead.
…You know we can’t say no when you look at us that way.

Frances: So we accidentally pumped a whole bunch of water the other day, which isn’t exactly good for our engine. In fact it kinda sucks.
Hayley: Feeding a diesel engine water is the equivalent of feeding a human being sand, and then kicking him in the junk.
Frances: Right, so somehow we had to get it out. And that somehow was by putting on our grease clothes on and getting dirty for a good 6 hours. And when I say ‘good’ I really mean ‘great.’
Hayley: We were essentially holding our bus’ hair as it coughed, hiccupped, and upchucked like a prom queen at an afterparty. Now I remember getting dirty and carrying 2 gallon buckets of veg-vom, 3 if you include the gallon that was smeared all over my body, sure. That was pretty rad. But riddle me this, why was Lucas under the Bus with a hose in his mouth?
Frances: So you remember the dead animal in our tank?
Hayley: I told Kate not to club that baby seal.
Frances: No, it’s a critter that got in there before we even left Hanover. Well it was plugging up the passageway that was allowing us to drain the tank, so Lucas being the manliest man man that he is, was blowing bubbles into the tank to move the critter and allow the veggie juice to flow.

Despite the fact that Lucas may have been mildly veggie-hazing himself, everyone was pretty chipper. We decided to take a break in the afternoon (aawwww noooo mom, let me play in the veg just a little more! Please, I like the way it smells like butt!) and check out the falls on the other side of the park.

Frances: Thank goodness Ranger Merritt was there at the falls with us, otherwise we may not have been observant enough to see the (not so) incredibly rare Yellowstone beast, the Awkward American Tourist (watch out they bite). After the ‘oohs’ and ‘aaaahs’ we made dinner and finished un-vegging.
Hayley: A bison ate my left arm. Actually that’s not true. It was Frances.
Frances: You had sauce on your arm. I didn’t want it to go to waste. That’s right, I’m calling you saucy.

After we finished eating dinner it had already gotten dark so we called it a ‘shucks’ kind of day (but in a good way) and tucked ourselves into bed. With Fran’s and my chatter at a temporary cease-fire, Lucas says that he could hear a wolf pack howling somewhere in the park. Blissfully unaware and serenely passed out, our theme song colored our dreams a dull shade of bling-bling-platinum. (Cue ‘Umbrella’ by Rihanna ft. Jay-Z).

-Hayley & Frances