FRIDAY FOLLIES: Wagons and Trailers and Planes! Oh My!

Bob Dalrymple and his girlfriend, Kathy Neal, are leaving Michigan and heading for Colorado, because, Bob says, the economy's suffering, the winters in Michigan are too cold and it's time for adventure.  He wants to go someplace warm.  That's what he says.  His two kids live in Colorado, but apparently they've neglected to tell him there's a reason crowds of retired Snowbirds aren't descending on the Centennial State.  It's snowy and blustery and cold there in the winter!

Bob, disabled after a truck-driving accident, takes it slower these days but isn't about to take it easy.  “I figure you can sit there and exist or you can go on an adventure,” Dalrymple told a Muskegon News reporter. “We decided an adventure didn’t sound so bad....I sold my stuff and I’m going, and I’m not coming back.”

He and Kathy are going to take a couple of months to get there and I'm just hoping they really understand about winter.  They'll be traveling in a mini-caravan of two wagons pulled by five horses, accompanied by three dogs.  One "wagon" is really a kind of camper, but the smaller one, the supply wagon, looks like a true covered wagon (See gallery here and near-enough picture below).  Their friends have autographed it with well wishes and Bon Voyages and desperate pleas to reconsider.

This from the Muskegon News:

He had the horses. Building the wagons is what would take the most work. He turned to a scrapyard, where he found the materials that would do the trick: A 60-year-old hay wagon, an old pontoon boat and a Winnebago camper.
Eighteen feet in length, the camper includes a refrigerator, a stove, a queen-size bed and a sink. Pulled by three horses, the driver and passenger sit in two bucket seats taken from a 1970s Chevy Malibu.

As near as I can tell the two of them will be exposed to the elements whenever they're sitting in their Chevy Malibu seats.  They'll be going across the plains, the dusty, windy, frigid plains, and I'm not seeing a windshield.  I thought this story was going to be a lark.  It was supposed to be fun, but now I'm alarmed.  Bob says they have gloves and boots and they'll be all right, but I don't know.  I've read those stories about hapless, ill-prepared pioneers falling for that word "adventure".  The outcome can often be grim.  So if you happen to see these two wagons going down the road, give them a big Howdy and maybe check to see that they're doing okay.  They seem like nice people.

Not Bob and Kathy, but a close-enough wagon. (With apologies -- the Muskegon News wants me to pay for pictures.)

The story goes that this guy was out walking and he "stumbled" upon an unattended refrigerated beer trailer equipped with outside spigots and -- Good Lord Amighty! -- empty beer pitchers sitting on a nearby table.  When they nabbed him, many pitchers later, his perfectly reasonable, though somewhat wobbly explanation was that he thought he had died and gone to heaven.  Everybody sees Heaven in a different way.  I might see my sainted grandmother but this guy saw free beer trucks.  But here's the part that must have really convinced him:  He wasn't charged with anything!  Not with public intoxication, not with Grand Theft Beer Trailer.  Nothing.

A feel-good story if ever I saw one.

Not the real trailer, but I'm guessing pretty close

Or maybe like this

But get caught trying to bring a Snow Globe on a plane and see what happens to you.  Or big hair.

 CNN contributor LZ Granderson wrote and talked about it this week, and yes, it's to laugh, but no, it's not, considering what kind of nuts are out there. Even less funny was the search through LZ's dreadlocks.  At least to LZ.  I snickered a little over that one, I admit.  How does one search through dreadlocks?  Not with a fine-toothed comb, I'll tell you that. 

LZ himself

But enough about all that.  Do you know how hard it is to be a Liberal? Well, do ya?  Roy Zimmerman thinks he knows, and, okay, I had to laugh. (Not that I saw myself in any of it):

I don't know where I've been but I've just discovered Roy Zimmerman.  My near-loss, because he has some really funny songs to sing, at least from where I'm sitting.  But it appears there are plenty of people who already know about him, so I doubt he even missed me.   You can find more of Roy's songs on YouTube, or, better yet, on his website, where his songs are for sale.
 

Those Magic Moments -- Fall in Michigan, My Michigan  (All pictures mine):

Every Color under the Sun

Autumn Morning Mist

Maples in all their Chlorophyll-free splendor

Birches and Cedar

Cartoon of the Week

Mike Luckovich