Christmas Adventures... or other experiences

Well, now that I've vented about PC Christmas in the previous post, I wanted to have some fun with this one.
How many of you have ever had a Christmas adventure? Or at least something really neat happening?

One of the coolest (literally) adventures I ever had for Christmas was hiking down one of the unmaintained trails into Grand Canyon, Arizona. On Christmas Eve, 1987, I and a friend named Raymond hiked down this little-known trail. This is not the kind of trail where they take the mule trains, and average hikers are discouraged from trying it. In fact, this particular trail, the John Hance Trail, is so narrow you can't get a horse or mule down it. It's only wide enough for one person at a time, and it is NOT marked. You have to apply for a permit from the Park Office just to try it, and you must leave an itinerary. You have to pack everything in and out. Stove, water, bedroll, food, utensils, clothing, medical and navigational supplies, and your tent. Not to mention cameras and (in those days) film. My pack weighed over 45 lbs when all was ready to go.
We got to about 2,500 feet below the rim, about 3-4 trail miles, when it got dark. We pitched camp, got our stove ready, and hunkered down for a Christmas Eve sleep. But, while taking a dump outside, Ray accidentally sat on a cactus! He comes back in to the tent and, sheepishly explains his predicament. He pulls down his pants, his ass comes out, and sure enough there are several cactus spines stickin' outta his rump. I figured this might be a ploy to get me interested in a sexual encounter involving his butt, but all I did was use my pliers to remove the long needles from his ass.
As we were sound asleep, at around 2:30 in the Christmas A.M. we were awakened not by sleigh bells, but rather by Santa's jetblast as the sleigh passed overhead. Our tent was pressing down on our faces with some powerful outside force. Turned out to be a Christmas blizzard! Blowing snow backed by 95 MPH winds! We spent the rest of the night sleeping with one arm (each) straight up in the air, holding the roof of our dome tent away from our faces.
When morning came, we decided to break camp and head back up the trail to the rim rather than continue our hike down to the Colorado River as per our original plan. Took us about 4 hours to reach the rim, and as we were gaining the last 800 feet of elevation, I was so overheated that I stripped down to my T-shirt and would shove my whole head into the deep snow about every ten steps or so, just to cool-off.
But, we reached the rim, fed some mule deer, and went back to our hotel room and enjoyed a nice, hot bath. Not at the same time, of course.

Another adventure happened once for me and my dear friend Mike Sparks, now living in Florida. Mike and I had numerous adventures during our friendship. This one took us to the Great Basin ghost towns of the Comstock era. We visited, on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, Randsburg/Johannesburg, CA, Rhyolite, NV, Gold Point, NV, Goldfield, NV, Manhattan, NV, and stayed Christmas Eve at the Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah, Nevada. We had a room with red velvet wall paper and brass beds. It looked just like we had stepped back into 1905. They had a little casino area in the lobby, and Mike and I were the only ones there. I won $20 at the machines; Mike lost all his gambling money. We had chicken fried steak for dinner, and it was good! Some of the ghost towns still had operating saloons, and we would stop for a drink and some friendly conversation with locals. Gold Point was, for me, the coolest of the towns. A true ghost town, 'way off the beaten track. Looks just like it came out of a Western.
We did a lot of great photography on that trip, and had a wonderful time.

I guess ghost towns figure a lot in my holidays, because during Chrismas of 1998, I joined Randall and Esta and their kids at Jerome, Arizona. Jerome is now a "living ghost" as it has a regular population. It's not a tourist ghost like Calico, CA, but it's not empty anymore, either. Jerome is one of my favorite towns, and no more than around the Holidays. Just the smell of the air with woodsmoke from Alligator Juniper being burned in people's fireplaces is simply intoxicating. There are always lovely decorations, the Catholic church always looks wonderful, and the view of the Verde Valley is magical. Earlier that day, my dog Odus and I had been up at Grand Canyon, and again there was snow on the ground. Odus's first snow!!! OH MY GAWD!!! He ran in it, he played with it, he slid on it, and he pooped in it. What a great Christmas!

Another Chrismas with Randall and Esta, 1993, we were in Northern Virginia, and we spent Chrismas Eve at Randall's brother Rob's house. That's where Randall and family are this year. Rob's not feeling well, so I wanna give a shout out to him and his family, who were always nice to me, the "odd uncle out." That Christmas was only the second time in my life that I had seen it snow on Christmas Eve. It was so awesome. We were on a cul-de-sac, and all of the other homes also had lights up, so with the snow covering them all, everything seemd to glow! There's this pervasive, muffled quiet that happens during a snow, and it was certainly quiet that night. It was positively magical. We worked our way slowly home that night, from one end of Reston to the other, following a Fairfax County Sheriff's car up the icy streets. He would stop every few yards and spin his tires until he'd broken through the ice on the road and hit pavement, which he would "plow" for a few dozen yards before repeating the process all over again. That was also the Christmas that I got a flying Christmas tree. I love Christmas trees, but they don't always like me. I've been attacked by at least one tree one Christmas, some of the others have discharged sap onto me, others have collapsed the minute I've gotten them in the house, but this one took off and flew! Okay, I was driving home with this 6-1/2 foot tall Noble Fir tied atop my Volvo wagon. I'm heading home on Reston Parkway in evening rush-hour traffic, about 5:45 PM and doing about 55 MPH. Suddenly I feel, and hear, this kind of a reversed WHUMP!-kind of sound, and the car seems to lurch straight up. Instinctively I look in the rearview mirror, and I see the headlights of the traffic following me (at 55 MPH) suddenly peel-off to the left and right frantically trying to avoid... my Christmas tree, which is now hurtling down onto the highway from an altitude of about 30 feet! As I watch in the mirror, this flying fir lands with a CRASH into the middle of what had been a brisk rush-hour flow on Reston Parkway, but now looks like a mass Busby Berkley dance move as cars, in unison, leave the road and fly nosefirst into the shoulder or the middle divider. So, on Christmas Eve, I got to be the guy who pisses-off the commuters and gets announced from the traffic telecopters as the motorist who "drops a Yuletide gift onto the evening drive home."

Hope your Christmases are as funny and adventurous as mine have been.

P.S. The Flying Christmas Tree survived it's aerial adventure. It was just a little... flat... on one side.

Aloha!