Good day all you blog readers!
4 days have come and gone and here we are at Fanshawe Conservation Area cleaning up after a fairly breezy day at Pittock Conservation displaying our scaly travel buddies. Our programs, displays and van have thankfully been running smoothly up till this point which has been due to a stellar effort on everyone's part.
HOWEVER
Sometimes things don't go as planned and we have to learn from our mistakes after the fact; and boy did I do some learning yesterday morning.
Things seemed nice enough when I poked my head out of the tent and made my way to the van to have my early morning caffeine dose, I was wrong. I opened the van and found it a MESS, since Brittany has been adament about keeping it tidy this trip a rule, which if broken, is punishable by death (not really, but you get it) I was a little confused in my grogginess.
To my gasping, head slapping dismay I soon realized what had happened...INVADERS!
After our program the night before I had left the driver's side window open and had inadvertantly let some woodland creatures have a crack at the meager amount of food that had been left in the van (oops!). I cleaned up all I could and told the others about my blunder.
Then it dawned on me.
Check the rest of the van.
I swung open the back doors and took a quick look around, nothing seemed out of place but then I looked Under the storage shelf. Two big yellow eyes stared back at me. I slapped my head again. After opening the side door the mystery creature emerged so we could see he was a raccoon twice as big as any normal furry bandit we had ever seen, probably due to his high diet of camping leftovers.
I opened the side door for him and he quickly decided he didnt like our van anymore and left, only pausing long enough to look back at us ( I swear he grinned). Our excitement died down... but not for long. I watched as Amanda walked to the now open side door, jumped a foot in the air and screamed "There's another one!" (head slap), he obviously didn't like the screaming so much so he jumped up on the drivers seat (looked rather funny actually) and then scurried out the open window hot on the trail of his companion.
Unfortunately, we took some losses including 1 apple, 3 granola bars and one aero bar that Amanda had stashed at the bottom of her zipped up knapsack.
Moral of the story: DONT LEAVE THE VAN OPEN IN ANY WAY. RACCOONS ARE VERY GOOD AT TAKING ADVANTAGE OF YOUR MISTAKES!
Cheers everyone we will be seeing you soon!
Bryan