Warning: my parents are not going to like this post.

Now, with that settled, allow me to illustrate the afternoon/evening where I got the most intoxicated I’ve ever been – off of three (sort of largish) glasses of red wine. This photo is of me looking for sticks in the woods to feed our fire with. I apparently wandered rather farther from camp than I intended but I don’t think DF and FF would have let me do anything too badly stupid. Also, I think I was dancing in this photo:

Liz in the Woods

Liz in the Woods

We’d gone hiking earlier in the afternoon (perhaps another post to come on this…perhaps not, we’ll see) and had settled around our rather pathetic fire playing a card game (phase 10, for those who are interested in the details) which I was winning rather handily (if I do say so myself…) until we uncorked a bottle of wine. I don’t love red wine but it does tend to affect me really strongly, so I stopped caring about the icky taste after about three sips. At which point I got overly interested in our meagre little fire, absolutely determined to make it a roaring fire like I was sure any guy could do without even trying. Girl Power!

It was at this time that the picture above was taken (and I think I’d consumed at least a full glass of wine at this point, too). I also think FF walked up to the bathrooms at some point and I managed to get completely covered in ash poking around in the fire while closely observed by DF (a nurse on the burn unit, so I felt quite safe). I never quite succeeded in getting the fire stoked to a level that would have made a caveman proud, but I hear that (before it started raining for the second night in a row) it eventually got going quite well. I don’t remember. I was drunk.

I would like to disclaim here that I have never really been drunk before. [UPDATE: I have been reminded that this is not exactly my first drunken experience. I stand by my statement that I've not been this drunk before, but perhaps I have had a run in with a screwdriver or two in the past... oops...] Being that I am 26 and I only just got drunk for the first time (and I might say the last time, but I seriously doubt it is… my friends all really like red wine… I don’t get it), I’m in pretty good shape. The reason I add this here is because I get a lot stupider in this post going forward. Somehow, I had two more glasses of wine…

I think at some point before dinner we finished Phase 10 (I lost, imagine that), so while FF (at least I remember it mostly being her) cooked our steaks for our dinner (which should have tasted MUCH better considering how much I paid for them… but I wasn’t exactly in a state of mind to appreciate the fine flavors of beef at that moment anyway) I rolled around in the dirt. Yes, that’s right. I rolled around outside of our tent because I actually couldn’t stand up anymore. How pathetic! Three glasses of wine and I’m a blithering idiot. 

The girls propped me up on a log and handed me my steak, which they’d kindly cut in half for me. I decided that there was no need to dirty anymore silverware, so I ate my steak with my hands. Now I was beginning to make the cavemen proud. Especially when I dropped part of the steak on the ground, picked it up, was too blurry-eyed to see any dirt on it, and ate it anyway.

Then it started raining – God’s way of sobering me up. I don’t remember exactly how we got all of our stuff inside our cars or the tent, but we managed it, and I felt a LOT better once we turned in for the evening. In fact, I think I was the last one to fall asleep out of the three of us. But it was pretty good fun (though I am fairly certain I apologized to DF and FF no less than a hundred times each, during and after my intoxication) and thankfully they only took a couple of really incriminating photos of me. Those are some good friends, those girls!

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