These seasonal pests have a lot in common. Both rely on warm weather to awaken from hibernation. The tourist hibernation is not what medical science calls true hibernation. They are watching TV. There are many good shows on TV that can remind you why you don't go on vacation.
The Discovery Channel “Dual Survival” show recently hit the Olympic Peninsula Rain Forest.
The program followed the whacky misadventures of two bickering worry warts who were having no fun.
In other words, average tourists on vacation.
One of the odd couple was a barefoot hippie. The other was a Rambo impersonator. Both tourists were wilderness survival experts chock full of useless facts like, did you know that you can eat tree bark? It's a survival trick from the Donner Party.
Is cannibalism ready for prime time? I had to stay tuned.
First, the tourists flipped their canoe in a white-water river. All of their gear and supplies either sank or floated away. Don't worry, our heroes had a support team along for health and safety regulations. As for the fishing and hunting regulations, those went out the window once the survival experts decided they needed to kill an elk and/or a steelhead if they were going to score in the ratings.
During one crucial moment in the show, the hippie found a broken beer bottle, but you have to find some full cold ones for bragging rights around here. A broken beer bottle is a clue that you're under the road it was thrown from.
The road leads to town where you can search for edible cheeseburgers. That's about the only legal food in the rain forest these days that's available without a fishing license, tags, stamps, punch-cards and a season with size and bag limits.
Instead the hippie made the broken beer bottle into an arrowhead that Rambo fixed on a homemade arrow he was going to stick some poor elk with.
Fortunately, Rambo was unable to wound an elk. Instead he “found” a turkey wandering in the forest. There are no wild turkeys on the Olympic Peninsula so it must have come from a nearby farm.
Rambo managed to bag the tame turkey, adding rustling to his wilderness rap sheet.
Meanwhile, on a creek nearby, the hippie was illegally harassing spawning steelhead with a wooden gaff hook.
All he could catch was a fish that was already dead. That's illegal too.
The tourists built a fire and feasted on the poached steelhead and stolen turkey before wandering to the ocean. How they missed a logging road is anyone's guess.
Too bad. They might have gotten picked up by The Rygaards on Axmen. Instead they built three fires in a triangle shape which is an international signal to the authorities to come and write you another ticket.
The Dual Survival dudes hoped some nearby crab fishermen would pick them up so they could be on “The Most Deadly Catch.”
That might have been an out of the frying pan, into the fire thing.
Eventually a plane flew over and wagged it's wings and the show was over.
We don't know where the tourists went next. We're just glad they did.
I havent laughed this hard in a long time Pat! I saw that episode and was also a bit confused at how the experts, who in looking for the ocean, find a Sea run fish dead in a gravel ridden river....then on thier "westward ho" suddenly find themselves climbing through a headwater canyon! And to think, I almost packed the shotgun and headed out to Toms to look for some Toms!
ReplyDelete