Our second day in Monterey was equally as stress-free as the one before it, but the night between them was kind of ridiculous. It gets its own post.
Exhausted from another active day, we went to bed around 10pm on Sunday. I was deeply asleep within minutes, as was Aimee. But around midnight, I had a very vivid dream of animals sniffing around the tent. I thought nothing of it, but I was abruptly jarred out of sleep by something along the lines of, "Oh my God, Myles. What is that?!"
Never one to come to rash judgements, I shrugged my shoulders and promptly fell right back to sleep.
"No, Myles. Really."
Now she had my attention. And she was right, there was definitely something poking around the outside of our tent. The next few thoughts came thorough my head at about mach 7, but I think that they were something along the line of:
"We're in California. Yellowstone is in California. Yellowstone has bears. BEARS!!!"
Aimee, in a somewhat panicked tone, asked what we should do next. I thought back to all those other times that I was within five feet from a bear... I had nothing. Shaking the tent seemed reasonable, since tasty humans don't shake tents, only the untasty ones do that.
At one point, Aimee reached for the inner tent zipper. Apparently, she wanted to shake the outside part of the tent, but I was taking considerable solace in that extra millimeter of mesh between us, and whatever was eating our food. So I tried to mask my terror with an artificially lowered voice, and said, "No. The tent needs to stay closed." And that was the end of that.
When we no longer heard movement outside of the tent, I grabbed my overpowered flashlight, unzipped the tent, and kissed Aimee goodbye. I scanned the area, and listened for animals, as if I would have been able to hear anything over the sound of my own heartbeat. But I did eventually spot the intruder. It was not a bear. It was a tiny, piece-of-shit raccoon eating my Clif bar. My Clif bar. (Aimee is convinced that it was a male raccoon, since her Luna bars were left untouched.) I was pissed, but still a little shaky from the abrupt wake up. So I asked Aimee for my knife, since I had apparently turned into Crocodile Dundee in my sleep. I could use a new raccoon hat, mate.
But, alas, the raccoon ran off before I could figure out what to do. But not before eating a decent amount of our camp food, and our pizza left-overs from the night before. (Oh yeah, some jackass left his pizza left-overs right outside of his tent, and got pretty lucky that it only attracted a raccoon.)
Once the considerable amount of adrenaline started to leave my blood stream, I realized that I was sitting on a pretty nasty belly ache (again, probably due to the pizza). And since none of my vacations are complete without massive diarrhea, I grabbed our TP and headed for the latrine.
Newly refreshed, I headed back to the tent, and fell asleep surprisingly quickly. But even the slightest noises woke me up throughout the night. At one point, I accosted our poor neighbor when I heard him going through his stuff around 1am. Again, I grabbed my flashlight, quietly opened the tent, and jumped out at him (with an embarrassingly loud "Ah-ha!").
Him: "I...uh...err...I was just getting out my glasses.
"Oh, uh, sorry. I was...you know...there was this raccoon...uh, never mind."
-M
