I couldn't get the words "Donner Party, table for two" out of my head all night.

We had a friend over for supper last week, a guy who's just come back from another impossibly difficult trek with a buddy of his. This guy's idea of a good time is my idea of Vacations From Hell, and I tease him by saying I suffer vicariously through him.

This time it was a month long hike over part of The Long Trail in Vermont. This has been one of the coldest winters in this region in 25 years or so and (as if that wasn't enough) a freakishly heavy snow year along parts of the mountainous trail.

He talked about how impossible it was to even find the trail a lot of the time because snow depth had obscured many of the white blazes that mark it. Even those blazes that were above snow were practically invisible because they were white.

He said they were always, always cold despite all the high tech stuff they had.

"So how are your feet?" I asked him. Mutual friends had mentioned that there were concerns about frostbite when he first came out of the hike.

"Well it wasn't quite frostbite, which is good, but they're still numb," was the reply. He said a doctor friend told him he'll get the feeling back eventually because nerve endings grow back at about the same speed as human hair.

This is so far from my idea of fun that you can't even see fun from there. But the thing is, his face just glowed when he told us about it.

I was thinking about that this morning as I worked a little bit on some old family photos I got a while back. One of them is of a lumber camp one of my great-great-great grandfathers worked at in the 1870's. He would half work himself to death on his little farm and then spend the winters and late spring half working himself to death in a lumber camp so the family could have some extra cash.

I wondered what this man who worked his body hard all his life would think of the fact that three mornings a week I go to a gym and force my body to exercise. I wondered what he would make of the idea that I pick up heavy, heavy hunks of metal for no good reason and force my body to exhaustion on an elliptical machine three mornings a week And That I Do This For Fun.

Hmmm. Maybe our friend isn't the only person with an odd sense of fun, eh?

Fortunately, my three loyal readers seem to share at least part of my sense of fun.

Yes, there is another suggestion for the Wangitude Tee-Shirt, a gift to mark the spousal unit's 50th birthday on April 25. This one comes from Karl:

This is so much fun it has to be illegal.

--Marn

Mileage on the Marnometer: 129.96 miles (209.1 kilometers)
Goal for 2003: 500 miles - 804.5 kilometers