Supah Dupah

Happy Super Bowl Monday!

My sister MB thinks Super Bowl Monday should be a national holiday; she always takes a vacation day. She's a smart girl.

Personally, I'm not a huge football fan, but I do like the festiveness of the Super Bowl, if I have a cool place to experience it.

Take, for instance, last year.

Mistah and I had just set out on our 6-week Vitamin D Tour. We left Connecticut and its cold and snow behind us at the end of January, and headed ol' Westy south to one of its -- and our -- all-time favorite states:

The Sunshine State. Can't beat that, can you?

We ended up in our favorite campsite in our favorite northcentral Florida State Park: Gold Head Branch. Gold Head -- or, as we call it, The Head -- has lighting like nowhere else, and it smells like nowhere else. It's a little slice of heaven on Florida's northcentral ridge.

Everybody knows every good Super Bowl Sunday starts out with a long morning hike . . .

. . . we walked the entire length of the park and back . . .

. . . which took about 2½ hours.

But hey, we had time.

We had all day. And those long leaf pine forests make for fabulous hiking grounds.

Aw, there's Mistah in front of Deer Lake. We swam there last time we were at Gold Head, in a warmer time of year. But ssshhhhhhhh. Swimming's not allowed there. So don't tell anyone.

See what I mean about this place?

It is, as my niece would say, awesomely awesome.

And then it was time to get back to the campsite to get ready for the Big Game.

Our great and glorious friend Ranger Steve came over for the festivities. He offered to have us over to his house, which is right down the road from our campsite, to actually watch the game on tv but we said, Oh no, we've been thinking about this all winter. We're going to listen to the game on the radio around the campfire -- it's the only civilized thing to do.

So a campfire we did build. Well, Mistah did. He's a campfire-builder extraordinaire.

I, in the meantime, am a campground-veggie-chili-maker extraordinaire.

Mmmmmmmmm.

We have electricity at Gold Head, so we can live large with things like overhead lights, an electric wok, a camera battery charger, and our computer. For which we picked up a rogue wifi signal. Now that's living.

When the three of us get together we like to take many self-timers to mark the moment. Mistah sets up the camera with a long exposure so a flash isn't necessary. You have to stay really still while the shutter's open . . .

Oh dear, looks like we've got two Steves here. Stay still, Steve!

There, that's better.

It was a beautiful night, the stars filled the sky in that place of no ambient light, and we had ourselves a time listening to the game.

Still Life: Super Bowl XLIV

Yay Saints!

And in the morning, it really doesn't matter if one watched the game on a huge TV at a friend's house, or listened to the game in the north Florida woods . . .

. . . it's Super Bowl Monday.