June 17 [Fort Wilkins to High Cliffs State Park]
June 17
It was super-chilly, and Aric was just huddled up against me for warmth. When we shifted around, he pressed his face up against me and his nose felt like a little icicle. At least the wind wasn't too bad.
Hopefully, it would be warmer tonight and tomorrow morning. We were going to go back south—we couldn't go any further north, after all.
I asked him if he was too cold, and he said that I was warm and furry and was doing an excellent job of keeping him warm. Then he said that he might as well get up, even though it was just barely light. He said that we had a long day of driving ahead of us, because tomorrow we had to get to the dock in Manitowoc before the Badger sailed, or else we were going to have to take the long way back home, through Chicago and around the bottom of the lake.
Well, I wouldn't have minded stopping in Chicago, 'cause maybe Cayenne would be there, but I guess we weren't going to have time for that.
We made the usual breakfast and put out the fire. Aric asked me if I wanted to see the very end of the peninsula and a special forest, or see historic Fort Wilkins.
I asked him what it was like, and he said that he imagined that it was kind of like the lighthouse keeper's house, but maybe there would be more military stuff there, since it had been a fort.
I was sure it wasn't open yet—the sun wasn't even above the trees yet—and I could tell he was kind of eager to get on the road. So I said that the end of the peninsula and the trees would be nice to see.
It took a while to get there, and it was kind of rugged and windblown. I could see an island off in the distance which was Manitou Island, he said, and he said that beyond that, if a storm came from the west or northwest, the next chance at a safe shelter was probably Whitefish Bay, unless you could run nearly due south and make Marquette or one of the bays along there.
He said it would have been nice to have been able to camp here, because seeing the sun come up over Lake Superior would have been pretty amazing.
We went around the southern side of the peninsula, and drove near the lake for a while until he turned inland, and we got to Estivant Pines, which he said had been saved from loggers in the seventies.
There were trails leading through the pines, and he said that there wouldn't be any airplanes here, so I could fly below the treetops to my heart's content. So I kissed him and then took off, working my way up to the very tops of the trees, and even though I didn't mean to, I lost him on the ground, and when I went to fly back down, I had no idea where I was—I went through the trees but there was nothing but undisturbed forest below me.
I flew around for ten or fifteen minutes, looking for him and then looking for anybody, but it was no good. There was no one to be seen, I couldn't hear any voices, and there was nothing in my nose but the scents of pine and dirt.
I landed on a nice thick tree branch and tried to think about which way I'd flown, how I'd turned around the trees and then where I'd gone when I was looking for him, and I thought that maybe if I went back up I'd see a familiar landmark, but I didn't—the trees pretty much all looked the same.
I couldn't even call anyone on my radio, because it was back in Winston. I was all alone in the sky.
The thought of Winston triggered a memory, and off in the distance I saw a lake that I remembered we'd gone by just before coming to the park, and I didn't know if it was the same lake because things looked different in the air than they did on the ground, but it was the only clue I had, so I flew over to it and sure enough a road went by, and so I turned with the sun at my tail and flew down along the road, following it all the way back to the park entrance and then to the parking lot and Winston.
Aric wasn't there.
He was probably still in the woods, waiting for me. Maybe he was sitting on the ground, resting, or maybe he was walking up and down the trail more and more worried because he couldn't find me. Which meant that I had to go find him, but it would be dumb to just go flying or trotting down the trail because if there were forks in it I might miss him, and then we could spend all day not finding each other.
Most people locked their cars, but Aric didn't, so I opened up the door and got out my journal and wrote a note for him, telling him that I had been back and was going on the trail to look for him and if he came back to stay put, 'cause I'd check back on him. Then I put the note on his side where he couldn't miss it and went back into the woods.
Then I turned back around and got my vest, radio, and blinking light and put them on, because even though it looked really silly, it would make me a lot easier to see.
I trotted along the trail, stopping every now and then to sniff around for his scent. Dogs are really good at sniffing things out, and we are too in the air, but in a forest it was hopeless. There were too many other scents for me to get more than a hint, and unless he'd started peeing on trees I wasn't going to be able to track him like that.
So I went to the air, and there were a couple of places where I got a bit of a whiff and knew he was still upwind of me, but if I flew directly into the wind, I'd have to go off the trail, and then there was a pretty good chance I'd get lost again and have to repeat the whole process.
It felt like an hour or more before I saw him, standing in a tiny little clearing and looking up into the trees, and I was so happy to see him that I broke into a gallop, and he heard me and snapped his head around in my direction and I could see the look of relief on his face.
When we were walking back he said that he'd kept walking, thinking that I'd follow the trail from above, and then after he'd gone a little ways he realized that I probably couldn't see it, so then he'd turned around and gone back to where I'd been, thinking that maybe I'd landed back there but I hadn't, and then he thought that maybe there was a place where I could see the trail from the air. I told him that I'd been completely lost until I found a lake and the road and Winston.
We both agreed not to split up like that again, because it was stupid. And he said that maybe next time we went out into the woods, we'd have little radios that could talk to each other, just in case. Because while pocket telephones were pretty convenient and everyone in Kalamazoo had one and could use it anywhere, they didn't work up here, except sometimes when we were near cities.
When we were back at Winston, I put away my flight gear and we started heading south.
We were out of food in the icebox, so we stopped in Bruce Crossing, at a restaurant called Char's Cafe, and Aric said that I should at least try some of a pasty, because that was the traditional UP food. I wasn't sure that I wanted a whole one, because they all had some kind of meat in them, so I had some whitefish and just a little bite of his pasty.
After we'd left there, we drove along railroad tracks and saw a train with blue locomotives and dusty reddish cars that were all the same, which Aric said were train cars that carried iron ore to port.
And we went past some hills that Aric said were the Porcupine Mountains. I told him that out west the mountains were a lot taller, and he said that Michigan wasn’t known for its mountains. I could see why.
I thought that we were going to be inland for the rest of the trip, until we got to the shore of Lake Michigan, anyway, but we started going due west for a while, and then right after a park which was called Little Girls Point we were up mostly against the coast again.
He stopped in a park that he said was right on the border between Michigan and Wisconsin, and we walked all the way to the water and sat on the beach and ate, and there was a little spit of land that ran out along a river, and Aric said that if we went to the end of that, we'd be as far west as it was possible to go in Michigan.
So we walked down there and scratched our names out in the sand, and he took a picture of it and me standing in fetlock-deep water just off the end. I suppose I could have gone out further, maybe up to my belly, but the lake was pretty cold.
He said that it was good that we were going to be in Wisconsin, because we were out of cheese and almost out of beer, and those were the two things that Wisconsin had in abundance. He told me that they also had cheese curds which was a traditional Wisconsin food and when they were made right they would squeak when you bit them.
I didn't believe him, but the first store we saw along the side of the road had a sign out front that said cold beer and cheese curds, along with fishing gear.
He pulled into their parking lot and said that the best place to get food out in the country was a bait shop. And I sat in Winston while he went inside, and he came back out a minute later with a little white box like the one that the fudge had been in (and I kind of wished we'd been going back through Mackinaw City, because it had been delicious) and he was right; it did squeak when you bit it.
It was a little weird to be eating it as we were driving, but Aric said that we were running kind of late, and had to make up some time.
I said that it was my fault for getting lost, and he said that it wasn't at all; it was just further than he thought. But we were both kind of quiet for a while.
The scenery was almost the same as it had been in the Upper Peninsula. I knew what it was like when we got further south, 'cause of the train trip, and I finally asked him if we'd be going near Milwaukee. He said that we'd be north of it, but we might go through Green Bay, if he felt like taking a shortcut.
Then he said that it might not save any time, because at best we'd get there just after rush hour, and sometimes it was faster to just avoid cities.
There were lots and lots of little lakes around us, and Aric said that this was the boundary waters and once when he was a Boy Scout, they'd spent some time canoeing on the lakes, and it was one of the most fun trips he'd had. Then he talked about other trips that he'd taken, and a lot of them sounded like they weren't all that much fun, like when their tents had blown away on an island in Lake Erie, or when he had been on a winter camping trip and his boots had frozen and he had to walk in his socks to the fire so that he could thaw them out.
He said that it had been fun, though, even if it was sometimes miserable when he was on the trip. And I think he was right about that, 'cause some of the storms that we worked it was easy to forget how our wings were aching and our eyes hurt from squinting them shut against the sleet, or being so soaked by rain that you thought you'd never be dry again . . . those were the days that we talked about and remembered, not the easy days where we just pushed puffy clouds around on schedule.
And the sailors never said much about uneventful crossings, either. I think sometimes they even made stuff up if nothing interesting had happened.
We got to Stevens Point around dinner time, and my stomach started growling at the familiar signs of restaurants, but Aric said that we weren't going to eat at an Applebees, or Taco Bell, or any other fast food restaurant. We'd just drive a little further until we found a town with a fun-looking mom and pop restaurant, and I said that was smart, but that didn't make me any less hungry.
So we got off the 10 Highway in Amherst, and he found a restaurant called The Rivers Bar and Supper Club, and it really didn't look like much, but Aric said that the restaurants that looked the worst on the outside were often the best on the inside, and he said it was a good sign that they had a parking lot full of cars and an ever better sign that none of them were as beat-up as Winston.
I told him that we'd passed a bait store not too far back that was full of trucks just like Winston, and there had even been one with mottled green and brown paint, and he said that bait shops were for on-the-road snacks, not dinners.
We picked the right day to visit, because they had all their fish on sale. Aric said that was because Catholics couldn't eat meat on Fridays. I was too hungry to care why; and I got their combo plate which had lots of different kinds of fish and shrimp, too, and I couldn't even eat it all. Aric didn't want any more than a couple of nibbles—he said that he didn't like fish and never had.
The waitress—who had been watching me but not in a bad way—put my leftover food in a little box so we could take it with us, and we got back on the road.
I fell asleep.
I guess it was too much food and the kind of soothing noise that the tires made on the road, but I just put my head down and the next thing I knew Aric was gently shaking my shoulder and said that we had arrived at our campsite for the night.
I asked him where we were, and he said that it was the High Cliff State Park, on the shores of Lake Winnebago. And he said that was a very special lake, because it was where Winnebagos—which were a kind of Arvey—came from. He said that every spring, they would get together on the shores of the lake, and then lay their eggs, and in the summertime, they would hatch. And he pointed to a little Arvey that had a big W on it and said that was a juvenile, and that the bigger one a few sites over was probably its mother.
I was a little too sleepy to realize right away that he was making that up, and I asked him if we could go and see their breeding grounds, which I kind of was picturing as a big parking lot. Then I remembered that they were just machines like Cobalt and Winston, but bigger.
He said that we could go down to the lake if we wanted to, and I thought it would be a nice way to end the day, so we took a trail that looked over the lake, and it was plenty big, but not so big that you couldn't see the other side.
It had been really nice to be all the way up in the UP and where it was very remote, but there was another kind of beauty in all the lights across the lake, almost like stars that had fallen to the ground.
We walked back in the dark, until we found our campsite. The whole park was nearly full, and Aric said that he had been lucky to get a space, because it was the weekend now and this park wasn't very far from Milwaukee or Green Bay.
When we were in the back of Winston, I asked him if that meant that we couldn't have sex, and he said that it was dark outside, so no one would notice if the truck was rocking a little bit.
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I barely remember riding Badger. I was somewhere in my single digits.
Ah the Winnebago... such a majestic, adaptive creature. See here, as the rare space Winnebago aids its lifelong friends.
Well, now I know: If I'm ever separated from my pony, start peeing on trees.
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Yeah, I remember my 4 years as a boy scout. I learned how to put up a tent in the rain & how wonderful food tastes after an 11 year old tries to cook it on a campfire. How much we learned about fire safety by setting the campsite on fire.
How to tell if someone is trying for the Woodcarving Merit Badge (they'll have an exacto knife & bandaids on all their fingers).
How easy it is to burn food on a campfire & how hard to scour pots when all you have for hot water is what you heat on the campfire. The wonders of outhouses.
We had no TV, so we learned to make our own fun. One of our games was
Draw an outline around your foot
Take turns throwing knives at each other's feet
One point for making him move his foot
One point for him if the knife would have hit his foot if he hadn't moved it. Don't worry, kids have good reflexes.
5 Mile Hikes are more fun if you carry all your stuff with you in a back pack (military uses this as well).
In 4 years time, I only remember 3 or 4 times kids had to be rushed off for stitches & nobody got burned bad enough to need medical attention..
If it weren't for the constant sex I would swear Aric was middle-aged.
Or possibly,
Though that seems a little formal.
You know when somone is serious about camping when they pull out a pop up tent, and a kilo of 12 inch spikes to hold it down.
even more when you realise the reason the loop is extra large on the spikes, is so they can get the crowbar through to use as a torque handle.
Folding trowel at least, or trenching shovel, toilet paper, 20 metres washing line, Propylene sheet. $4 of gear that can make your time so much nicer.
I like those dismount back versions. Leave the room behind when you drive to the shops. If only they used beam carrier variations so you could have a sorter vehicle, or is that what the 5th wheel for Winston is for, articulated living trailer?
At least they still have satelite radar tracking her.
Ask any cyclist, rides in the rain are much more memorable. We aqll remember that championship runned during an hurricane. Well, the remain of it anyway.
I suppose that Winnebago's owner do have a big meeting at lake Winnebago, even if it doesn't lay any egg.
7493337
I love that movie.
Okay, caught up again. Not sure how long that'll last, though.
In any case, the road trip is quite fun thus far, especially for someone who's only experienced that part of the country from thirty thousand feet above it.
Oh, is that what my dad had in the garage? An unhatched Winnebago egg?
Also, sage advice from Aric. If your curd doesn't squeak, it's sub-par. I should know; I grew up there.
7494083
Survival tip #57 - Pee on trees so your pony can find you.
-written in the margins of Aric's Outdoorsman Handbook.
if this truck is rocking don't come a knocking.
I get the cell phone issue. My parents have no cell reception and it can be a pain.
I haven't had pasties in a long time. I need to find someplace that sells them.
Wisconsin cheese and sausages are good, but their beer is extremely overrated.
People have been arrested for transporting Spotted Cow over the border to sell, and the stuff isn't even all that great.
*Drool* cheese curds.
The only place here in San Antonio that sells them is A&W. And they are too salty.
Never had Cheese Curds....and they squeak? interesting. I had this jerk of a roommate once who was from Wisconsin and she kept bragging about how good her cheese was...to our roommate who was from France. Luckily my French roommate didn't care about the quality of cheeses at all and just let her talk. It annoyed me, though. She was so judgmental on the type of cheese I ate. I love cheese but I'm no connoisseur like she was.
And, cool to see a Steven's Point reference in a story. This show I like is set in Steven's Point, Wisconsin and I honestly thought the city was made up for the show until I met a girl from Steven's Point about four months ago. She knew about the show and said that the writers clearly picked a random city out of a hat since nothing they said about her city was accurate. If I hadn't met her and instead saw Steven's Point written in this story I'd be totally mind blown, haha.
Somehow, I keep imagining Silver Glow telling her friends and co-workers tales of her visit to Earth... And her listeners being utterly gobsmacked trying to comprehend it all.
I know this is probably referring to the fish, but I saw this:
and thought "SIEG ZEON!"
7497015
Lots and lots, although it's usually about not getting enough.
7497050 Lake Erie has some nasty undertoes in some areas. It's apparently not that uncommon to get sucked away from shore.
I had a few instances where I'd look back towards shore while swimming and find myself a lot farther out than I expected.
Water was always warm out at Longpoint wildlife reserve.
7494035
I've never had the privilege to ride it, although I did ride a number of carferries in Norway and Denmark.
7494076
7494083
It's a valuable survival tip!
7494130
We had biscuits once that were burned on the outside and raw on the inside . . . barely-warmed raw steak because we couldn't get a fire going (that was how we learned you couldn't start a fire with hardwood) . . . dropping M-80s in the outhouse . . . polar bear swims . . . ah, those were the days.
When my dad was in high school, some of his friends did the game where you try to stab a knife into the table as close to your own hand as you can, or go between your fingers as fast as you can. It went as well as you could expect, with the loser sometimes needing stitches.
I was one of the kids that had to be rushed off for stitches! And on that same camping trip, I also got my polar bear badge for staying outside for 24 hours in the winter.
7494175
Just because of the bad jokes and puns, I assume? Some people appreciate dad jokes when they're still in college, trust me.
7494178
Correction made; thank you!
7494279
Winston hasn't got anything that nice; just a plain aluminum pickup top that leaks a bit in the rain, has no gaskets, and a broken latch for the rear window. Basically, the kind of thing people leave by the side of the road for free.
I've got four of 'em. One has a slightly buckled roof, since I didn't have any clamps and had to carry it home upside-down in the back of the truck.
7494394
Memorable, sure. Fun at the time . . . I'm dubious. I have fond memories of rained-out camping trips, but I'm not sure I enjoyed them as much when it was happening.
7494452
Tis a pity. Michigan is a great state to visit, or to live in. I've been here nearly 40 years and still have stuff I need to see.
7495076
Possibly. They are round, about twenty inches in diameter, usually white, and have a W on them.
Here's a rare picture of a juvenile Winnebago next to its mother.
rv123.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/f847b5d87a79c48e5caaac60cc1de4ee.jpg
Wisconsin cheese curds are the best. You just can't get the good ones anywhere else. I've had poor imitation cheese curds in Michigan, and they don't squeak at all.
Something every outdoorsman should know.
7495128
7497115
yeah, you're probably right
yeah, but with courseloads at my school it's kind of understandable if you don't. I was flat out told by the department chair that it's a 5 year program when I took a tour. There's been an upward trend but 4 year graduation rate for mechanical engineering is about 20%. There's also a class (not my major though) that's a valid excuse for dropping off the face of the earth for a quarter. I'm at the point where most of the poeple who aren't passionate and dedicated have dropped out, makes group stuff a bit easier.
they make bank though, but it's not as stable (tied to construction). It's a lot of large scale stuff. Sports stadiums, industrial plants, things like that.
My school has a crappy online resource, just a stereotypically bad online E-book, quiz service. Wrong answers, incomplete informations, crappy UI, the whole nine yards. I hate it with a burning passion. The good thing is at my level I'm mostly coming across .edu websites so the info is good. I have found some decent sources online though. But in general, googling stuff can be unreliable.
I just assumed the helicopter was a pinkie thing. I've done a lot of stuff with enchantments. Like I mentioned, I've managed to re-create some of our analog tech, so you can definitely do a lot of high tech stuff.
It really depends on how exactly you set them up and explain stuff with headcanon. How I have it set up is definitely a lot easier than some others, because their tech has a similar structure to ours.
7495268
Yeah, mine doesn't work at my parent's house, for some reason. It's gotten better lately, but it's still not a very good signal, and they live in an actual city.
You can mail-order them, but that's not the same as fresh. Or you could make your own; I found some recipes online.
7495759
It's not so much that their beer is great, it's that it's one of the two things that come to mind when you think of Wisconsin. Three, if you count the Green Bay Packers, which is basically an excuse for people to put on cheese-hats and drink beer. One of my friends in college was from the Dells, and she finally convinced us to take a trip there. Now, we'd poked fun of her for years for being a Wisconsinite, and even more so when she said that the cheese factory in her hometown had exploded once and rained burning provolone on her town, but she said that there was more to Wisconsin than just cheese and beer. Of course, right when we got to the border, the first thing we saw was a big billboard advertising cheese and beer.
7495771
The A&W cheese curds are a very pale comparison to real cheese curds. About the only thing they get right on them is that they're cheese.
7496248
They do. They're very good, if you like cheese.
The French make some darn good cheese, too. Although I've noticed that the French seem to like more pungent cheese than most Americans.
TV often does that (if the city even exists at all, that is). I strive for a higher level of accuracy than that.
7496262
Just getting them to understand how big ore boats are . . . and Silver Glow hasn't even seen a big laker. The Paul R. Tregurtha dwarfs the Roger Blough.
7496697
I don't know that reference.
7497057
Well, yeah, that's what I meant. How many guys complain that they're getting too much?
7497189
There are some riptides in the Great Lakes, but it's my understanding that they're usually not as prevalent as they are in the ocean. That having been said, the lakes can be nasty, even when they look pretty calm. And there are certainly some areas where they narrow down that the currents are particularly bad for the unwary.
7497422
To this day I always giggle at having been told by a German that Wisconsin has too many bars.
7497422
Hmmm... Now I'm curious.
Paul R. Tregurtha
Over 1000 feet long. (Daaaaaaaaamn!)
Made in Ohio.
Company is from the Great Lakes region.
Classification: Lake Freight
Makes coal and iron runs from one lake to another.
Port of Registry: Wilmington, DE
Wait, what?
7497425
Char Aznable was an ace mecha pilot from the classic anime series "Mobile Suit Gundam" who flew for the enemy force the Pricipality of Zeon, whose rallying cry was "SIEG ZEON!"
7497371 Depending of your definition of fun...
I did not have much of it though, I bonked after the first quater of the race and spent the reminder chasing after the pack. And obviouly failing to catch up. I wasn't laughing so much.
7497422
at least my parents have an excuse. They live in the country.
I'll probably end up making them, I'm a good cook. There's a place about 40 minutes away that sells them, but it's currently consistently in the triple digets (over 100 Fahrenheit/37 Celsius) so not really pasty weather.
7497162
I'm sure they're going to remove the process equipment and structures, and grade and seed the tailings ponds. I doubt they're going to try to fill in the pit or something like that. They're going to just turn off the pumps for that one.
7497187 *Alondro sends you a bottle of bitter spirits... which totally doesn't have solanine in it... as part of his diabolical cover-up... which is absolutely not taking place...*
th09.deviantart.net/fs71/PRE/i/2011/261/a/5/shifty_eyed_applejack_animated_by_crimsonbristle-d4a79lo.png
Are we sure Aric isn't a secret dad?
7497443
I think it does. No offence to Wisconsin, but I really think it does.
7497572
I assume that's much like ocean-going ships which often have 'ports of convenience' (that is, the 'legal' home port is somewhere where the laws are good for the shipping company). Although I was surprised by that, too: a lot of the lake freighters can't go in the ocean, so it's not like it could ever get to Delaware, unless there's some inland route I'm totally unaware of. It could also be based on the home of the ship owner's company; I don't know for sure.
Back in the day, a lot of the lake freighters' home ports literally were their home port; it was where they laid up for the winter, but not all of them.
7497620
Gotcha. Yeah, that's something I've never heard of.
7497667
Well, the race was at least memorable then.
The only baseball game I remember playing in little league was the one we lost 52-0.
7497699
Ooh, over 100 is not pasty weather at all. Best to wait until it gets cold.
7497924
I recall that some states have rules about what they have to do after mines close, but I don't know if Michigan is one of them. They may only have to get all the toxic stuff out and then that's it. And sadly, even that may not be a requirement.
7498432
Mmm, tastes like burnt almonds. Tasty!
7501137
He's not. That's the official word.
7501505
My first thought was: "If I know Delaware, and I think I do, someone's evading some taxes." 'Cause there's no way that that boat has ever been to Wilmington.
(Yup, the Welland Canal and locks are too small for the Tragurtha, and they seem to be the biggest ones around.)
FINALLY catching up to the massive backlog I had with this fic.
Now I'm geeking out because they stopped at High Cliff. That's literally 15 minutes away from me. I've been there several times; it's a great way to kill a weekend afternoon.
He's not wrong.
7501505
None taken. Also, agreed.
So far behind. Never enough time.
I noticed something:
Should be "lake" there.
There's an old rocket launch site up there, pretty much just north of where I guess they saw Manitou Island from. To bad they didn't make it up there, though there isn't much to see it's still kind of cool.
7501576
IIRC, a lot of the credit card companies used to be based out of Delaware as well, which I can only assume was to avoid tax liability.
7501669
I'm still not caught up on the massive backlog of comments
Ah, a Wisconsonite, eh? I had so much fun in college making fun of your state.
7504844
The last time I went to Wisconsin, the very first billboard we saw when we crossed the state line said "BEER AND CHEESE NEXT EXIT."
7526960
Heh, you and me both.
Correction made; thank you!
7765820
Huh, that's interesting. I never knew that.
I also found out on my last road trip around Michigan that there was a nuclear plant near Charlevoix
7501505
While I can understand not recognizing Char Aznable's catchphrase, I have trouble believing that it took you until 2016 to have first heard of Gundam.
7497620
He also invented red things going faster, predating WH40k's Orks by nearly a decade.
For USA Catholics, it's kind of weird. The Pope says "No meat." In 1966, US bishops said "Meat is OK, BUT you are expected to do some other form of penance." Which most Catholics never heard of & thus ignored.
These days, "No meat on Friday" has made a comeback.
11279565
I do know of a number of Catholic churches that have a Friday fish fry. It’s been a thing as long as I’ve been around (or at least paid attention to it), but I didn’t know about the extra penance. And I don’t know if any of my Catholic friends do, either. Maybe I’ll ask next time I talk to one.