Minnesota Mike

This was the scene at our campsite in Grand Mesa. After the rain stopped on Saturday night, the setting was beautiful and serene. Sometime late Saturday, a large SUV pulled into the site two over from us.  The camper started pulling everything out of his car, made a fire using old pizza boxes and other burnable items (not firewood) and then put everything back into his car.  He was apparently car camping since he started his car several times during the night, probably to keep warm.

On Sunday morning, while just waking up and starting to make coffee, our campsite neighbor paid us a visit.  He loudly came into our site asking if we had seen a gray cat. Really??  We said we had not and that’s why we kept our dog tied up.  He said, “He always does this, just when I need to leave.  So, where are you guys from?”  REALLY??   “I’m from Minnesota and I really like it here,  I think I’ll stay.” We we’re not in chat mode and pretty much ignored him as he wandered off to our campsite neighbor across the road.  Heard him give the same intro about the cat, but when the “So where are you from” question was asked, he got trapped.  Several minutes later he finally left the poor guy alone and went back to calling “Gabriel” and trying to reason with Gabe that it was time to go and to get into the car.  He started to play loud pop music as if that would alert Gabe to come.  He also made several passes back and forth along the road as if he were leaving and Gabe better come out of the trees or he would be left behind.  Still no Gabe.

After about two hours of this, he told our neighbor that he was “running to Walmart” (Really?  The nearest one is several hours away) and was he going to be there in case Gabe showed up.  Not sure what our neighbor said. We were packing up and apparently got the message that we were not sympathetic to his situation so he didn’t come back to us.  We never got his real name but nicknamed him Michael since his cat was Gabriel and they made a good pair of archangels.