So it is Sunday (well actually it is Thursday but this happened on Sunday) and I am at home fully expecting to have yet another totally boring day. Up pops my Mom (my friend Robin) on Yahoo messenger and she is telling me about how she is getting packed for her trip to Reno, and cleaning the house…at the same time her sister Erica is telling me how bored she is and how her boyfriend is totally ignoring her. Robin mentions she needs to go get feeder fish before she leaves and that is it, the wheels start to turn.

Ok, so I offer to go get the fish for Robin and bring them to her house…this allows me to get out of my freakin apartment and to see her before she goes. She says great, bring on the feeder fish. So I in turn ask Erica if she wants to surprise Robin and come with me…she says sure since it will get her out of the house plus she hasn’t seen her sister in a long while. Now it is on, a fish run with a big surprise coming, I love it!

Erica, who lives about 40 miles NE of where I live gets to my house and then we head out to get the fish before heading over to Robin’s place which is 52.6 miles SW of my apartment…lots of wide open spaces in VT. On the road I let Erica listen to her favorite country music on Sirius (Prime Country). I’m not a HUGE country music fan but Erica is my guest and I like enough country not to get driven crazy by it. The only thing that did drive me crazy were the god damned Sunday drivers and I kept Erica entertained with my bitchin out ever driver we ran into…not literally you lunkhead!

When we finally get to Robin’s house, about an hour later than she had expected, she was surprised and happy to see Bear (that is what I call Erica, get used to it). We add the feeder fish to the two tanks and Erica gets a kick out of watching the oscars devour the poor little comets…hell, we all were digging watching the big fish munch on the little fish…nature at its finest! Funniest thing that happened was that one of the oscars bit the tail off one of the feeders and that little bugger would not die, it just kept swimming around without a tail! Never a dull moment when you own cichlids!

It had gotten to be about 1:30 in the afternoon and the girls were both hungry so we decided to pile into my minivan and head out in search of some good eats! We had no idea what we wanted or where we wanted to eat…we just let our stomachs be our guide. We passed a pizza place, a Subway resturant, a Quiznos, a Burger King, a Dominos Pizza, 2 chinese resturants, a McDonald’s, and another BK when what did our eyes see…a Friendly’s! Sure, it may not be the greatest place on earth to eat, but you get a SUNDAE with your meal!! YIPPEE!!!!! The little kid in all of us wanted some ass cream! ASS CREAM!!! (Duh, you fucking dolt, of course I mean ice cream, it is a long story why we call it “ass cream” and I got better things to write about at the moment so that explanation will have to wait for a later post).

Nothing ULTRA-exciting about the meal. Mediocre food, bad waiter…the usual. The one thing that was quite hillarious was that in the Friendly’s menu they have a page of dinners that include an ice cream sundae in with the price of the meal and then they have a page of meals that don’t include the ice cream sundae in the price, but, and now get this, you can add a “Happy Ending” to your meal for an additional $1.50. A HAPPY ENDING?!?!?! At Friendly’s they offer a HAPPY ENDING? Holy shit! Is this the same type of happy ending they offer at massage palors? I sincerely hoped not since we had a guy as our wait person. I just found it absolutely fucking hilarious that of all the terms they could have used to say you can add a sundae to your meal for a buck fifty they chose “Happy Ending”, especially since it is a family resturant…I guess maybe I’m just a perv but I really got a good laugh at that one!

With our belly’s full of quesedillas and ice cream we headed back to Robin’s apartment. As we approached her place we came to a literal fork in the road and instead of going the most direct route to her house I decided to take the other path. Who knew it would be another 150 miles before we made it back to her house! Like I mentioned earlier, here in VT you can travel 10, 20, sometimes 30 miles before you reach another town or even a crossroad. When we started out we were in civilization but by the end of our excursion we were traveling down some god foresaken dirt road with ruts the size of nyc potholes!!!

I won’t bore you with a minute by minute account of the entire joyride…which basicically involved me bitching about other asshole drivers, listening to the hits channel on Sirrius and many choruses of “Ass Mud!!!”, “Penis Cheese”, “Matt Da-a-a-mon”, and “I’m so ronery”. Basically we just stayed on that one road for a looooooooong ass time. We nearly hit a bike rider…his fault, we went up hills and down hills, round zillions of the curves VT roads are famous for, passed through town after one-church-one-general-store-one-stoplight town, and saw acres and acres of farmland…lots of corn and cows (don’t you just love the smell of fresh cowshit in the morning!). All and all our first half of the journey was spent enjoying the company of good friends, acting like 12 year olds while trying to keep my minivan on the road, and avoiding shithead bike riders…oh how I hate these fuckers who think narrow country roads with no shoulders are good places to go for a gawd-damned bike ride!

We finally came to a point where we realized we better turn around before we started to see signs for Disney World. I absolutely HATE going somewhere and then turning around and going back the exact same way I came so we got off the road we were on and headed down a new road which we hoped would eventually take us back home, or at least to another road that would lead us to another road that would lead us to another road that would lead us back where we started…roads in VT don’t always go exactly where you want to go…and occasionally they just don’t go anywhere at all (ever hear the expression “Can’t get there from here”, well in VT that is 100% true!). After a few road changes, and me flying through a stop sign which I did not see until after I passed it, we finally found a road we liked and began our trek back to the mothership…er, I mean back to Robin’s apartment.

Now this would be a great place to end the story since normally it would just be a simple ride home. The passengers are usually tired from the ride, the driver is usually sick of driving so most drives home are quiet and uneventful. But not with us, oh no, we need constant stimulation…not really but it sounded good didn’t it? Anyway, for the most part it was a nice calm drive home, that is until we saw the sign. “Floating Bridge VT 3 miles” is what the sign said. Floating Bridge VT? Was there really a town called Floating Bridge? And did it in fact have a floating bridge? Fuck, what the hell IS a floating bridge? My curiousity was tweaked to the max and I turned off the nice smooth road we were on and headed off to see this place called “Floating Bridge”.

As we barreled down the winding dirt road both Robin and Erica kept trying to convince me to turn around and head back to civilization, but what the hell, it is only 3 miles and I was determined to see if it was just a name or if in fact there was an actual floating bridge in the town of Floating Bridge VT. We finally hit some asphalt, which usually means you have come to a town, so we knew we were getting close. After going up a hill and around a bend we caught our first glimpse of it, the floating bridge…yes, it really existed, a genuine floating bridge!! As we slowly came down the hill we had a moment to gaze upon the bridge…basically because some asswipe tourist decided to pull out of his parking space right in front of me and I had to sit there and wait while the idiot fucker tried to navigate his SUV back into the roadway.

With the peckerhead finally out of our way we got to see the floating bridge for all its glory. It was only about 200 feet long but it was barely one car wide and it had small walkways on either side jam packed with people, probably a mixture of tourists and locals. I approached the bridge slowly. For the longest time it looked as if the bridge was nothing more than 2 strips of wood where your tires would go and nothing else. It was only as I was just about to enter the bridge did I see those 2 strips were sitting on an actual bridge which was quite literally floating on the water! In fact the entire roadway was covered with water from the pond the bridge crossed. As a traversed the bridge I noted that the speed limit was 5 miles per hour…I thought I was going slow enough but maybe not since I was creating quite a wake in the water and was splashing those on the walkways. Halfway across the bridge and we are confronted by this dog that just won’t move out of the way. I slow down a bit and some kid finally grabs the dog out of the roadway however I guess maybe I was still going too fast for someone or they didn’t like me splashing them cuz I heard a voice from somewhere say “What the hell are you doing?”

Now more than halfway across the bridge, tons of steam pouring from under my hood…I guess the water was high enough to hit the transmission, or possibly it splashed there from me going a tad faster then 5 mph…Erica, Robin, and myself were having a fucking ball!!! A REAL FLOATING BRIDGE, HOLY SHIT! As we approached the other shore we wanted more, we wanted to live on that bridge we wanted to go back and forth that bridge for the rest of our lives…ok, that is a bit of an exaggeration, but we definately wanted to go over it again! The road on the other side of the bridge was narrow however and it was packed with cars and people and abruptly came to a “T”. Not really enough room to make a U-turn and sort of being forced by traffic to make a left or a right we chose a road and headed back to were we started. After wishing I would turn around and head home instead of searching for some stupid bridge, now Erica and Robin wanted me to turn around and go back. Back to the floating bridge. Back to the people looking at us like we were out of our minds for splashing them. Back to that crazy dog starring me down from the middle of the road. I wanted to go back too, I really did but the vehicle just kept traveling down the road, getting farther and farther from the bridge and closer and closer to home.

Once back at Robin’s apartment we hung for a bit having a drink or two, playing on the computer, and sort of just decompressing from the ride and the events of the day. Erica and I still had a 50+ mile ride back to my apartment and then Erica had another 40 mile drive to her apartment so we didn’t stay too too long. We finally said our goodbyes and headed home, thankfully with the Sun at our backs.

What started out as another shitty boring day turned into an amazing adventure that the three of us will remember for a long,long time to come! That is the magical thing about life, no matter how cynical and jaded I have become as I grow older and crankier, I still can be stunned and amazed by all the new things you can discover day in and day out! Life may suck 90% of the time, but so fucking what, the other 10% is just so completely awesome it makes it all worth it!!!