Trail Vertigo Part IV

Hitting the pavement, seeing the sign for McDonald's 0.4 miles up the road and then actually turning the corner and seeing those big beautiful golden arches was one the most purely joyous moments of my life. I'd be hard pressed to think of a happier time. OK, I wouldn't be hard pressed, but this was a top ten happiest moments of my life. Stick that in a commercial Ray Kroc!

So after salivating and almost breathlessly ordering a quarter pounder meal, I make a phone call and while I'm talking, just starin into the hypnotically yellow french fries and zombie-like pushing them into my mouth.

"You're stuffing your face aren't you?" asks the voice on the other line.

"Yup," comes the involuntary response. The only thing that snapped me out of my food daze was realizing that I wasn't eating the fries with ketchup, a cardinal sin that I would regret if I got any farther into the mound of potatoes.

This McDonald's even had the nectar of the Pibb family. I drank Mr. Pibb's finest creation until I had a stomach ache.

After using the bathroom to freshen up homeless man style, and possibly making a group of older Australian tourists think I was actually homeless with my dazed wandering around the store (I repeatedly walked back and forth to the garbage can because I kept finding new things to throw out), I went outside to try and find a place to camp.

I searched for 10 minutes in this big dirt lot with parked construction vehicles in it, but couldn't find anything flat or comfortable, so I (in keeping with this homeless theme) found a soft, flat sandy spot in a ditch on the side of the road and set up my sleeping bag.

This after I feared that a real, in-the-flesh homeless person would fid me in the night, beat me senseless and rob me while I was zipped up and defenseless. But the vacant lot next to McDonald's was right on the highway and was surprisingly much louder than my trusty ditch. So the ditch won out despite my fears.

As I lay down, trying to keep my eyelids open for just a bit longer, stomach churning with fast food, the clouds break, and the moon shines down just for me on my sandy oasis on the PCT.