Strange Wilderness

I was trying to make you feel better and you hit me in the head!

 Now there's a bump on my head. It looks like a dinosaur egg. 

If that dinosaur hatches, people are gonna think I'm some sort of prehistoric gentleman bird.

-Strange Wilderness-

So I just got back from a week of camping at the Black Sea. The camping notion has never really moved me. Lord knows I make my fair share of mistakes but I'm not a fan of intentional digression, and camping to me seems like a notion for gumps that prefer the simplicity of living a few life steps backward. Camping might as well be called Staring because it's what's happening, besides sweating. After John Blonde's wedding in Krasnodar, we all piled in twelve cars and bounced three hours to some peninsula on the Black Sea. After the tents were all set up, everyone started madly collecting firewood, only to make soup in return.  Soup is not the ideal camp food, but no one told Russia. The American camping spirit grills out and doesn't like to clean up, so all that's left over from a meal can just go in the fire, be it bones and napkins or Krispy Kreme boxes. That's about my speed.

The beach pretty much looked like a Charleston or Mobile beach except grasshoppers became the new crabs. The same weekday warriors swarmed the place though, complete with strollers and watermelon. There were noooooo waves. The dirty surf was filled with rocks and the water wasn't freezing, but cold enough to wake guys up at the aquatic moment of reckoning. A Russian trail of life stretched for miles down the bench and it was more subtle than just the vodka bottle litter around. The little Vlads haven't mastered the concept of sandcastles yet, so there were Herbie shaped lumps of wet sand piled for miles like African termite hills. I had no idea snakes were even in Russia until I stumpled across three on one beach stroll. Walking the beach was my vacation on vacation because I couldn't take the whole Swiss Family 300 air around camp. The Russian guys fellowshipped all day long, so I walked quite a bit.

I survived too.

The best part about the whole week was seeing the heavens at night. There actually is a few benefits to being out in the middle of nowhere on a beach. The Milky Way graced the entire sky at night and it just blew my mind.  

There is nothing more frightening and beautiful than Space.

All in all, the sun, the beach volleyball, freetime, shells, and the Milky Way made up for the soup, the heat, smoke, the nude, and everything Russian of the trip and I was glad to leave. Me and the two Antons took a bus to Krasnodar, spent the night,  and woke up early again to catch another train to Rostov where we then would fly to Moscow. Since Russia has essentially three months of good weather, the whole country dashes to the Black Sea for the summer and leaves the last week of August, so all the flights from anywhere near the Black Sea were $700+ so we frugally traveled inland. To mostly my dismay, Rostov was hardly frugal.

At this point, it's understood that particular attention to custom service in Russia is flat out made up and should never be hoped for. Corruption should not have to be anticiapted either, but oh well. I had to leave 4000r rubles under a police hat across the airport to avoid two days in jail because I was traveling with a "unregistered" passport. 

That's bullshit, it's just cuz I'm black.