First off, I have to defend myself and say that I had good intentions! Okay, with that being said, here's the story:
Our weather forecast for Mother's Day was supposed to be rainy, but as so often happens, the weathermen were wrong. We had a pretty decent partly-cloudy day, so I offered to take my mom hiking on the Plover River Segment of the Ice Age Trail.
I've been wanting to show her the new trail section mostly consisting of boardwalks for a while now and this seemed like a perfect day to do it. With her knee problems, I figured this would be easy enough for her to attempt. She enjoys my hiking stories and assists all the time with drop-offs and pick-ups at trail heads, but often times the trails are too difficult for her to accompany me. I wanted to give her the experience of one of my hikes in a more do-able setting.
I also figured it was early enough in the season to avoid the dreaded ticks that are so prevalent on this segment.
I was wrong.
Once we got to the end of the boardwalks, I noticed about 10 ticks crawling up both my legs and they were moving VERY fast!
I brushed them off and then started picking more off my boots. I quickly brushed through Charlie's fur and confirmed even more ticks. I turned to Mom and said we had to leave, but was afraid to tell her why... she hates ticks!
As we were walking back to the car, I mentioned that the ticks were pretty bad already. I had glanced at her light-colored pants as I walked with her to make sure she was okay so far, but when we got back to the parking lot, I realized that we were both crawling with them - as well as both of our dogs.
We quickly began removing ticks from each other and the dogs and then loaded the dogs into the car before more ticks could crawl back onto them. I knew there were still more on the dogs that I wasn't able to find but that would have to wait until we got home. (The rest of the afternoon would be spent bathing dogs, picking ticks off them and doing laundry.)
I unbuttoned my pants and saw one on my waistband. Ugh. This was going to get weird.
Since the parking lot was thankfully empty, I told Mom to get in front of the car (to block the view from the road), and we both proceeded to take our pants off. We pulled our pants inside-out and removed ticks from the inside of our pants and then off each other's legs.
You know, when I woke up Sunday morning, I had no idea that I would be responsible for my mom stripping down to her underwear in a public parking lot in broad daylight. This was not the Mother's Day I had planned.
At least she had a sense of humor about it. And even though this was NOT a pleasant experience, it'll be a Mother's Day that we'll both remember for a long time.
I can just hear it now... "Remember that Mother's Day when you stripped down to your flower-printed underwear in the parking lot?"
