Quite an adventurous hike yesterday. We tiptoed across roaring streams, detoured through thorny bushes where the trail was under a foot of water to the grand finale. I needed to pee and I went off the trail, over a small hill and found a tree. With approximately 730 acres of park land, I found 3 square inches that contained a nest of yellow jackets. Urinating on them really pissed them off!! I barely had time to get my pants up when they started swarming all over me. Indeed there were 2 or 3 of them in my pants. Elizabeth's dog, Gussie, had followed me, and we went runing over the hill with the swarming bees. My hiking buddies starting swatting them and I almost freaked out when I looked down and saw about a dozen of them on my jacket. I got my jacket off and started working on the ones in my pants. When it was over, I had been stung 5 or 6 times and there were another half dozen stings among the group. Gussie seemed ok, but Elizabeth got stung 3 times. I actually had 3 Claritins in my hiking fanny pack, which was distributed and that helped enormously-- the swelling was going down by the time I got home. But the pain was making me unhappy. Ibuprofen and ice seemed to help somewhat. Rather than sitting around and feeling sorry for myself, I went to a party at Elizabeth's house (newly bought house). It was basically a reconvening of the hiking group, and we had a wonderful time. Elizabeth prepared a sit down dinner from pasta thru apple pie and we told stories and laughed (including killer bee jokes). It could have been so much worse and while I was inflicted with the worst of it, the pain and suffering was fairly minor in the grand scheme of things, and nobody went into anaphylaxis (Howard is allergic to bee stings!!). And now our group certainly has a grand story to tell.
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