Monday found The Fool stocking up on provisions in Wykoff, and dealing with a number of people asking him "Want a ride?" in a smart-ass fashion. His foodstuffs included such fine products as Slim Jims, Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pies, and Mt. Dew's new Code Red!!The walking right now is pretty boring and miserable, between towns. The roads have narrowed, and there isn't much shoulder, and there are swarms of gnats and sometimes mosquitoes that hover constantly around him. The gnats are the most fun, because they just keep slamming into his face and head, over and over. He even went so far as to put on his gortex jacket and hat at one point, despite the temperature being in the 90s, to shield himself from the gnats. On Tuesday, after a fine breakfast at the Pine Cone Diner, the heat and humidity, and the gnats and mosquitoes, and the fact that he had ended up on a dirt side road, plus the eggs and bacon churning in his stomach, all combined to cause him to kick the ground, and scream an obscenity (It's a synonym for sex and it starts with f-u-c-k.) But then, somehow, magically the dark cloud lifted, and he started picking up an NPR station on his radio, and things got better for a while.
Austin is a strange town, in that you can't really enter it by walking from the east. You have to get on the Interstate to make it in to town, but walking is illegal on the Interstate. With no other reasonable options, the Fool snuck onto the freeway, scurried a half-mile, and entered Austin, home of the SPAM Museum, and Hormel Headquarters. The weirdest thing is that the museum is in a mall. The Fool took a day off on Wednesday to experience Austin. After touring the SPAM Museum, he feasted on a chili burrito, made with SPAM, at the mall, saw Moulin Rouge at the movies, and then headed to Subway for dinner. While he was at Subway, the employees started all giggling at him, which was sort of annoying. As his revenge, he stole a bag of corn chips while they weren't looking. As he ate the corn chips later that evening, he reflected on the old saying "A salted corn chip is much sweeter when stolen." "So true, so true", he thought to himself...Thursday was wet and humid, and so he spent 4 hours in a Hardees restaurant doing video editing. He camped in some state marshland near Albert Lea, where he was eaten alive by mosquitoes. By his count, he now has 7 million mosquito bites.
The town of Albert Lea was pretty annoying, since all the useful businesses have left downtown, and are in plazas on the outskirts of town, with no sidewalks to get to them or between them. Main St. is basically just offices in the old storefronts. The Walking Fool found himself falling asleep on a park bench on Main St. in Albert Lea on Friday morning at around 9:30. The he realized what was happening, screamed, got up, and marched to Blue Earth by Saturday afternoon. He crashed in a motel there, and then spent Sunday pushing himself to walk all the way to Fairmont.
The heat was pretty bad, and he kept having hallucinations where he would see the Kool-Aid guy off on the horizon. But that was actually kind of fun!
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