EB 258: Link’s Camping Night Of Horror

We say, welcome to Ear Biscuits. Is that how we say, ’cause if we say, some reason that– Welcome to Ear Biscuits. Yeah, that’s like, it’s like is welcome the first word? ‘Cause that seems really odd to me right now. Yo, oh, it’s easy. Sounds like I must have. You’re really fresh, man? What do you think it should be now that you’re back from your solo trips? Change it. Greetings. Greetings, okay do it. Greeting that’s it. Greetings and welcome to Ear Biscuits. The podcast where two lifelong friends talk about life for a long time. I’m Rhett. And I’m Link. This week at the round table of dim lighting. I’m gonna talk about the trip that I am fresh off of. I got home last night from six days of van life, boondocking in the middle of nowhere, camping. Just me and my wife, some national parks, a lot of Utah, probably Mormons, I didn’t know. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Just statistically. I didn’t ask Just statistically speaking, probably ran into a few Mormons. I didn’t run over anybody, I didn’t run into anybody. Like there were no– That’s good. There were no accidents, but I will say on the last night something happened to us that I just have to, I wanna tell you the whole story. It just, I was so scared, okay. I’ll just say we, Christy and I both got really scared. Okay. And it was just a strange story. And I just wanna tell the whole thing, and that’s why I texted you this morning, I was like, “Hey, I think for coming here to record first thing, “fresh off our trips, “I think I’ve got with everything I wanna share with you. “I’ve got a whole episode.” If it’s okay for you to then have another episode, I don’t care who goes first. Right and so today we’re gonna hear about your trip. Next time we’ll hear about my trip. I will give you just a short preview. Which incidentally includes me being scared. Dude, I was thinking about you a lot. I was like, I wonder, okay, we’ll get into it. So, but it also, so it also includes an update on the conversation/argument/debate. Am I a competitive person. That we turned into an entire episode. I had some time to think about that. And I have sort of, I have some perspective on that. I definitely do not want that. Just trust me. It will not be a majority or even a significant part of the episode. It’s just an update. Are you saying this to me so I’m not scared? No, I’m saying it to– To them. I’m saying it to all the people who, some people enjoyed that conversation and some people didn’t. You know, I only saw some people’s like, this is the first one I’ve never, I did, I just had to quit listening to. Yeah, I saw that. And I totally get that because it felt like it was, some people don’t wanna hear like, turn into a debate. So I have just an update on some perspective, that kinda came to me in the desert and also just a summary of my trip and some other things that happened. But let’s hear about yours. Even right at the beginning of this, when you said greetings and you had a different voice. Is that the new Rhett voice? I was playing into. Okay. Are we gonna include– Sure. The part that we– I think we did. Yeah, they heard it. Yeah, I basically forgot how the Ear Biscuits started. I mean, like, I literally forgot how it started. I do have this feeling, first of all, I’m not totally awake. I should have, I had a coffee. I should have a second coffee. I do feel like I’ve, I need a day. Like the experience that I had and that Christy I had that I share is gonna be very raw because I haven’t fully assimilated back into life. I think that’s what, are gonna feeling that a little bit? And I got home– Get home last night. I got home last night later, even later than you did, like I came home basically as the sun was going down. Six days of camping, turns out that’s a long time. And I was not alone. I can’t, I mean, I really wanna hear your experience ’cause I’ve imagined a lot of. And we’re gonna record mine tomorrow. So it just one day apart. So it’ll still be fresh. It’ll still be fresh for me. Okay, okay. Well, just to give an overview of my trip, we ended up deciding, let’s say we drove past Vegas. And when we stopped in Vegas and we got something to eat, I mean, we just ate in the car. That’s the great thing about this sprinter van is that– What did you eat? What did you serve? While we were gonna go through the Raising Cane’s drive thru– Oh crap, I stopped in Raising Cane’s in Vegas yesterday. So did I. No, you didn’t. Yes. Hold on, you ate at Raising Cane’s in Vegas yesterday? No two days ago, I’m sorry. I ate at Raising Cane’s– When we were coming back through. I saw the sign I was like, “Oh, Raising Cane’s.” Chicken tenders. I got to try this out, everybody, Post Malone also went to it. And so I got in, ate in my car. While we were trying to eat there on the way and then the sprinter van would not go through the drive thru. So we had– The Raising Cane’s I went through, went to, ’cause I hadn’t mind rooftop tent on, I thought about this. There was no overhang. So we went to a different ones. I went to the one on the east side of Vegas. I can’t say which one I went to. ‘Cause as soon as I wanna drive– Too much traffic there– ‘Cause I was coming from the east coming back home. Okay, but there’s more than two. Yeah, and as I saw the sign, I was like, “Well, I’m going there.” It’s pretty good, right? I mean, it’s like, I would say it’s like Zack Spees, but a little better. My opinion was the chicken is good. Chicken is great. The fries are horrible. I thought the fries were horrible. I’m comparing them to Bojangles and Bojangles fries are way better. Dipping sauce was good. And then we’d already had that. That’s the only thing I’ve had slaw bad. Slaw was bad, yeah. Tea good, I got tea. I didn’t get the tea maybe I should’ve have got the tea. They didn’t have a biscuit though. Oh, Texas toast. Oh, the Texas toast was good. It was good, yeah. That and the chicken tender– I highly recommend it. So we start there, but we’re eating in the van. We’re peeing and pooping in the van. We’re washing our hands in the van. There’s a shower, we could even shower in the van, but there’s also a hose off of the back of the van where we ended up showering. And because it was– ‘Cause the shower on the inside is so small? So small and there’s a toilet in it. Oh yeah totally the toilet. No toilet toilet. Are you gonna talk about– But it was hot water. Are gonna talk about the pooping? Are you gonna get into that? Sure, yeah. Because I’m gonna get into that on my trip. As time allows for me, we have to throw back– Perspective, okay. To my experience when, once I hear yours. ‘Cause I would not say that’s a highlight or something that I plan on talking about at length, but I’m always game to talk poop if you wanna go far. For me it will not be an insignificant part of my story. Okay, okay, okay. I’ll just add some about two cents at that point. But until then, I’m just gonna say, you know, we stayed in the van. We got the five guys take out, we took it to the car. On the way back through is where we went to Raising Cane’s and we figured out we could call them and they would bring it out to us. And that’s when ate that. Cub side, I saw that sign. And when we, we kept going from Vegas, from there we decided, I saw one of the Sklar brothers tweeted that they were at Zion and I was like, “Am a direct message Sklar bros.” You know I haven’t talked to him in a while, but we’re like, they know who I am. And I said, I’m thinking about going to Zion, but I’m concerned about the crowds, the COVID regulations and everything, and you can’t get on the shuttle. I have no shuttle reservation. And he said, “Well, you should definitely go do a private shuttle. “You can pay, “there’s one, there’s shuttle companies that go in, “you just get one of those “and then you get on a private shuttle. “They take you right.” ‘Cause Zion and we ended up doing that and he said, “We did the narrows hike, you should definitely do that.” I saw the pictures, he had like a walking stick and these special boots. And he was like wet. I was like, “Okay, we’re gonna do this.” Based on just direct messages and tweet. ‘Cause I was just gonna go to Bryce Canyon and skip it because less people go there and it’s less regulated. Anybody can go in. But I began to understand when I got there to Zion, it’s relatively small. I mean, when you compare it to like a Yosemite. It’s small on the map. Yeah, it’s this one canyon that, I mean the Virgin River just cuts through this thing and it almost doubles back on itself. And it makes these like amphitheater areas. And to get up into that canyon, you have to be on a shuttle. So they just don’t let cars go through there ’cause they would jam up the whole thing. And so that’s why the shuttle thing is so important. So we get up and we made a reservation of 9:30 be picked up, we go out there and– How far, how much ahead of time did you have to call to make this reservation? It was noon, I was, it was noon the day before. And they had a few spots open in on that shuttle. And so we went the next morning, we go out there and the shuttle takes you all the way through to the back end of the park where it’s like, it is a, cul-de-sac basically like a river made sheer wall, like thousands of foot tall, like red rock, mountain climber heaven type thing. I don’t even wanna try to explain it. You can look at the pictures and it’s like, they always say, until you go, you really can’t appreciate it– Is it better than Yosemite? It’s so much smaller and so much different. It’s like going to an attraction. There’s only, you can really do it. I mean, you can spend multiple days there and enjoy it. But I felt like we just did that one day and we did the one hike and I was like, “You know what, “we’re gonna move on to Bryce the next day. “We’ll call it a travel day.” Which is a different national park. Yeah, so just to tell you about the narrows hike, you’re hiking in the river, which is like it’s, I mean, it is curved this deep chasm. Yeah, this is the one you see on Instagram. Yeah and it’s just absolutely amazing. Like, you know, I can show you some of the pictures, but there’s no, after you hike in a little ways, everyone’s just getting in the river and there’s no trail anymore. And you’re just hiking in the river. And it’s usually like shin deep. Sometimes it went to mid thigh, deep on me and it was cold. And I was like, I was taught, I was trying to get Christy like ready for it. I was like, “You know what? “We’re gonna,” she’s like, “We can turn back at any time.” And this is before we get in the water and I’m like, “Come on, we gotta do this.” What kind of shoes did you have on? I just had on our quick, dry, low top shoes. We didn’t wear our boots but these people have like– The ones that we took to like Fiji. No, not like water socks, just like hiking shoes. But low top. We didn’t wanna wear a high top because they would get real soggy. At least that’s what we thought. I mean, people are renting like these waterproof hiking boots with like ankle support. You really do need ankle support and they give you a stick and you’re supposed to use that to stay up. But like, I’ve walked in the river so much. It was easy to walk over all these rocks. It was like, when we crossed the Cape Fear River, except the water was clear for the most part– And cold. And really cold but you could turn your ankle and you could fall down easily. But I think we gained confidence when we saw like retirees trudging through this thing. And we were wearing a mask there’s a lot of people going up to this thing but it was a hike unlike anything else. And we go up there for a number of miles and it’s just, it gets to a point where it gets really narrow. I mean, it could have been like 15 feet apart, like sheer, a thousand foot in the air, it seemed like, and it was like, and you’re just walking through the up this what I would call a stream. It’s not really a river by that point. It was amazing. Sounds like there could be a problem if it was to flood. Yes, but they take all that into account in terms of, I guess they had confidence that there wasn’t going to be a flash flood or they would have shut it down. And there was so many, I mean, even with COVID, there was a lot of people hiking there. But it was totally worth it. The next day, I’m gonna go through the park stuff now, because what I really wanna talk about is the camping experience. And then the story that happened. Okay, so, I mean, that was a super cool hike. I definitely recommend that for everybody. Like I was thinking the kids would’ve loved it as once they got over the cold of the water, your feet getting numb and then– And this has gotta be as warm as the water gets, you would think. I would think so. It wasn’t faced by being, it was like in the mid 80s, actually it was in the low 80s. It was like an, it was like perfect weather to be there. Right. And then, so we camped that night, the next day we took it, we took like an easy day of just camping, like getting going late. But then we drove to Bryce Canyon which, it was like, you wind your way up out of Zion. And you go through, when these, when the tunnel was built through the mountain, it’s like the longest tunnel in the world at the time it was built in like 1920. And it was crazy, you’re like going through the mountain on this– How long are you talking about? Like, I’m gonna know, I don’t know– If it was the longest one in the world, it’s gotta be– Like 10 minutes to get through it. I mean, at least a mile. Oh yeah and we can look it up. I was driving, I couldn’t Google. I was like, “It’s dark in here.” But 10 Minutes to go through. Yeah. So several miles. Yeah, I mean, we were going pretty slow. We were probably going, oh, we’re going 30 miles an hour, 25. Anyway you wind up out of there. And then you drive for like a little over an hour, an hour and a half, and you get to Bryce, which is, it’s kinda like, if you’ve ever been to the Grand Canyon, you go in and it kinda feels the same. ‘Cause you’re in the woods and you go to the edge of this canyon. You walk to the rim of it. And then it’s all of these hoodoos is what they’re called. Like, you know if you make a sand castle, the type of sand castle people can make on the beach where they like drip sand in it, like the sand just plop, plop, plops on top of each other. It’s like that except done by erosion, not by addition. And there is this, like these pinnacles of sandstone stuff just everywhere. And it’s like a magical fairyland that you’re walking down through them. So we did a hike down through there and it’s cool that it’s so close and it also was small. So it felt like I can see all of this in one day. I can hang out for a couple of days and really appreciate it. But I can also move on knowing that I got an idea of what this national parks like, and I’ve done one of the more, one of the most famous trails. So we did that the next day camped that night. And then we drove back down just to get closer to home. We drove down to the other side of Vegas, like, well, on this side of Vegas, there’s a place called Red Rocks National Preservation Area. And it’s like, so we looked at all that, there’s like a cool scenic drive right outside of, like the mountains you see– On 15 on the main highway? To the west of Vegas, like that mountain range. There’s like this Red Rock mountain range. But you have to get off of the– Interstate? We, yeah. No, but is it like, ’cause I thought just yesterday I drove there and I was kind of, I was like, I’m trying to get home by a reasonable time. So I didn’t stop at anything. I didn’t see any signs for that. That’s all like the Mojave National Reserve. Yeah it’s– Before that. Yeah, it’s right outside of Vegas. Like literally, if you go west out of Vegas, there’s like these condos and like these desert communities they build up that are like really nice. And then it turns into nothing. And if you go south around the Red Rock, that’s where we camped the last night. And then instead of coming back down into Vegas, we went around that and skirted the edge of Death Valley. It actually said it was faster from where we had camped the last night where the story happened. Are you gonna talk about camping? Ask you how hot it was. I picked that place because it wasn’t the hottest night, but everywhere I picked it was just trying to like escape the heat and anything that might be burning. That’s why I didn’t camp near Vegas the last night ’cause I was like the weather and I was like, “Ah, that’s gonna be like 105 during the day and– That was the high, like down at like Vegas level. But then once you got into that, like hilly rocky area, that where we camped, I picked it because it was probably like a high of 85 there actually, maybe 90, but then, so it wasn’t uncomfortable at night. So we went there and then we skirted the edge of Death Valley. We saw hot springs ’cause I saw a sign, took like a two minute detour, dumped our crap and our water. Like literally you gotta, I gotta, well, we’ll talking about the crap later. Well, hot springs? Tecopa, it’s just some little town, but it was just some guy at a booth. And then behind his booth where it was, there’s like a men’s shack and a women’s shack and showers. And then he let me look at it and it was just like a pool, like a actually it wasn’t rustic in any way. And I didn’t have time to get in I was just curious. I need to dump my crap and get outta there. And then we came home. You mean he had felt they had pumped the water into like a tub. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The water flowed in and there was a hot water pool. Like it looked like a big rectangular pool. Like 15 people could get in, but nobody was in it. And then there was a cold pool on the other side in another room and you had to be nude and it wasn’t coed. You only do nude if it’s coed is that right? That’s right. Right, I swear like I’m out, I’m out. You see, you know what? I wouldn’t do either one on its own, it’s gotta be both. But the main experience that I’m taking way– I will talk about that by the way. Okay, yeah, I know you were aiming for hot springs so I wanna hear about that. My main takeaway was not the beauty of these parks, but it was the experience camping. So that’s what I wanna spend the most time talking about. And then telling you the story about how I got freaked out night before last, our last night there camping. So I’ll get into all that. But first let’s promote some stuff. You know what? We made a lot of merch when we wrote our book, “The Lost Course of Bleak Creek.” And we don’t regret it, you sounded like you regretted it. We made a lot of merch, man. No, I’m just saying and it’s going to be gone forever. And so it’s in the last chance section of the mythical.com store. So if you want anything like this sweatshirt that Link has on– May be gone right now– Or, yeah I know, I mean, it’s in the last chance section, we’re recording this few weeks ahead of time. It could be gone, but go over there. That whole last chance section doesn’t just have the Bleak Creek merch, it’s got anything that we’re discontinuing and not bringing back. For instance, I’m drinking out of this good luck with that mug, you know, this doesn’t exist anymore. You cannot, you can’t buy this anymore, can you? I don’t think so, no. You can’t buy this anymore because we make a limited run of everything that we do, so– Gotta to move on, gotta to keep going. So good luck with that– What lies ahead we have no way of knowing. But under our feet, baby, the grass is growing, time to move on, time to keep going. Is that a– It’s Tom Petty song. Okay, got it. Mythical.com, get your stuff last chance before it’s over. Oh man, I gotta shave immediately after this, like I want– You’re itching. Yeah, this is the worst phase. And I took my razor camping. I was like, who’s gonna shave when camping. What kind of chump shaves when camping? People who commit to longterm camping– And also shaving, shave. They do shave. I think I would do that. Yeah, I met some people, I met several clean shaven people. Oh yeah, who were permanently as Christy calls them, road travelers. Yeah, I mean like– She could not remember the word for hitchhiker. And we encounter this guy on a back road who he was just walking down and I pulled over– He was clean shaven? I pulled over, he had a huge beard and I was like, do you need any help? And he had the most paranoid, guilty look on his face. Like he just killed someone and he was like– I don’t need any help kill anybody, I do it alone. I was like, okay and I was like, “I don’t know why I stopped and talked to you.” Did he, if he doesn’t, if he’s not like he funny– He was in the middle of nowhere and he was walking. And using my instinct is just to keep going, like let him eat the dust but I was being very altruistic. And then I got a little scared. That is a good point though, because I met a couple, just a young couple that was moving. They were in the process of trying to move from New Jersey to California in a van. And they were like, these fires started. And so where we were gonna go is basically on fire right now. So we’re kind of just hanging out, this was in Nevada. And they had been on the road for like three weeks and he was completely clean shaven and I haven’t thought about that at all. And he was not the kind of man who can’t grow a beard. I could see the potential for a beard. I think he was– He was just a shaver. He had his destination in mind and I think it’s psychological. It’s like, you know what, for that guy, I’m putting a lot on him. But I think, his tie to the civilized world is him continuing to shave. And once he stopped shaving, he was giving up on his hope of ever reconnecting with society on the west coast where he was gonna make a life for himself and I presume his partner. Yeah and the hashtag van life. And they were like take, they were in a converted Astro, a four wheel drive Astro. No judgement. And that had a popup thing on it. And I could tell by the way that the woman, his companion was taking pictures of like this hot spring that we were at and everything and waiting for the sunset. And she went to the hot spring and she moved things around. I was like, this is a total hashtag van life. And like, they’re getting these really good pictures. I can only imagine what this Instagram is gonna look like. Well, our van was, everything was, it had all the amenities, but the materials that they used to make everything were very rugged. It felt like you could just take a hose and hose everything off.. Because it’s a rental and I mean, they touted how much they rigorously clean the thing. In between people using it. If you were to do your own deal, you would want like mahogany, what do you– Yeah, the ones, it wasn’t picturesque because you start to think about hashtag van life is these people who put stuff on Instagram. And I was sitting in the back of the van on our, the day after Zion, when we were like, we’re just gonna take this day. We’re not gonna rush off the, we’re gonna wake up, we’re gonna eat breakfast, we’re gonna hang out here. Hell, We may even take a nap before lunchtime– A late morning nap. Yeah, which we did. Yeah, never been done before. And then I was like, you know what?– That seems almost impossible. Before– Yeah, I know, right? The whole hanging around in the morning, which for me ended up being the highlight. I’ll talk about that, but never did it strike me that I should get back in the tent and take a nap. Like not even– Well these are, it’s different. The back doors of the van are open. This is a hashtag van life moment. You lay down in the bed and then you stand up towards the cab at the driver’s seat. And someone takes a photo through the back of the van at the scenery someone’s– Did you take a bunch of photos that you’re gonna post hashtag van life? Well, I said, “Christy, come in here and take a picture of me.” I was laying on the bed thinking about maybe taking a nap. She was outside reading a book. And I was like, “Come in here, take a picture.” And so she takes my phone and she comes right up to me. I was like, “No, no, no. “Haven’t you seen go back to the cab, “you wanna shoot past me.” And then we try to do that. And then I looked at the pictures and I was like, you know what I’m not gonna blame Christy for this. It’s the decor, it’s the light, so many things have to line up for it to be hashtaggable van life. And let me tell you, it was not worth it because that right there– I think it ruins the enjoyment. It proved to me how much of a, if you get really good at it you can probably do it quickly, but it takes a lot of practice to look like you’re cool out there. When this woman– Van life in it. This woman went to the hot spring, she just moved a bunch of stuff around the hot spring. And then started taking pictures. No, I was, I’ll explain why, but I was very close to the hot spring. The thing that I didn’t fully anticipate, I guess I could have known this, but it’s one thing to say it, it’s another thing, it’s kinda like going to a park. You can say how beautiful it is, but until you’re there, you really can’t experience it. I think in a similar way, I could’ve known that this camping excursion would have been unlike any other, but I really didn’t think it through until it was happening. First of all, me and Christy, the best of my recollection, we’ve never gone camping just the two of us. Yeah me and Jesie have never done it. Every time that I would go camping. I mean, in college we would go and it was also mission oriented. We’re gonna go to this place so that we can experience these things so that we can do these things. And whenever we would start going off-roading, like when we first moved out here and we’re like, we did the Death Valley trips and stuff like that, camping was kind of just the means to bed down in between doing more off-roading, you know? The most prevalent experience at camping is bringing the kids. And there’s so much logistics associated with once you have one, two or three kids. Good gosh. Right, definitely one too many. And you know, it’s just trying to keep everybody straight and keep everything together. And somebody is all, everybody’s opinions and everybody’s on edge. I didn’t realize how, I came with a mentality of, this is not, everything we talked about in the last Ear Biscuit it’s not about, it’s just about taking every day as it comes. And as my desired outcome is quality time with Christy. And then hopefully that this is overall a great experience that we can then do again. So within that context, I started to realize, I started to have thoughts like the first night when we were camping and setting up the campus so easy, there was no tent to set up. There was no fire to start, which is illegal. I just had that propane tank. And you just fire that up, cook some stuff, you immediately turn it off and on. And like, it doesn’t spread flames at all, it’s legal. But it makes it so simple. I found myself having this– Abundance of time. Headspace to think and I actually had the thought for the first time, I’m starting to connect with nature. Like you hear people talking about how they go out into nature and like, some people say, “Well, I feel closest to God when I’m in nature.” Or I just like to connect with the earth. And I was like, you know, hunters do that in their own way. They connect with it so hard– So hard, so this– They kill it. But it’s this like primal thing, like farmers do it, they get their hands dirty. They like have a relationship with the earth that they learn to speak its language and to give to it and benefit from it. And I actually started to having these thoughts, just like a level of appreciation for connection, with nature that, on all of the campuses I’ve been through, there just wasn’t a lot of space for that. And you know, we’re like setting up our camp, we’re eating, we’re watching the sun go down– And it also helps in, I’m assuming this was your experience. ‘Cause definitely my experience. It also helps for me when you’re not in an established campground. To me that like– Dispersed camping for the win. That made all the difference in the world in being able to– Waiting for you to say for the win– To feel like there’s an opportunity to connect because when you’re in this, like, okay, well there’s this, especially when it’s like a pay– If you’re at a campground. Campground and there’s a building over there that a person built that you can take a crap in. That to me, that just takes away from it. Even if the scenery is beautiful and then also, oh and there’s another person right there next to you and you can hear their conversation. You can like hear, even if you can’t make out what they’re saying, you can kinda just hear You can’t stand that. And it’s like, okay, that’s part of camping is what we’ve thought. And we have camp like totally isolated, but we’ve done it with other people. Like when we went to Death Valley, there was nobody around, in many of those nights except for the group. But it was like five trucks full of guys. So you still have that. There’s no isolation, but yeah definitely that first night we found this amazing campsite just outside of Zion on national forest land using the ioverlander app. That was the app that worked best for me. I ended up using that yeah. We didn’t have cell service, but the spot was so good. We were like, all right, we’re going to Zion tomorrow. We’re gonna come back to the same spot and enjoy it again because it’s such a good spot. Like we could see the sunset, there was like a ravine right there, there were red rocks. It was amazing. I took a Garmin satellite phone. Not a sponsor. I think it was the enrich or something like that. And so even when I didn’t have cell service, I could text Jessie and it texts her and she gets a text on her phone– And a location. And a link to my location on the map. Oh, that’s cool, I’ll get one of those. And it’s like a monthly service that you can turn on and off. And I think it was like 30 bucks for the month. And then you just turn it off and it’s stagnant while you’re not using it. That’s nice peace of mind because yeah– I mean, I was by myself. Yeah, so– I definitely had to do that. Yeah, so that isolation, it really creates so much more space than I even anticipated. And it was just, it was relaxing and so it gets dark, you’re hanging out and I turn off the, actually I didn’t turn off the propane fire yet. We were like sitting around the fire. We were looking up at where we were just like, “Man, look at the stars.” Oh yeah. It was it’s the time of year, it took me a while to figure out why, I mean, it was totally clear. The most stars I had ever seen except for that night that we landed in Fiji and it was dark. And we got on a boat that had no lights on it. And they took us out to that Island that we stayed out for a week. And we looked up at the sky on this boat which, Christy and I were talking about that and we were like, “I can’t believe we did that.” Like in the middle of the night, it felt like in the pitch dark, we get on this boat and then we’re just going out and there’s no lights on the boat it seemed like because we would look up and we saw so many stars that, and it took me back there because that was the only time I’d seen as many stars as we saw that night. And I turn off the fire and I turn off all the lights on the van and we just craned our necks and just, we watched the stars like we were watching a movie and that had never happened. And you can see like the bright light sort of like clusters stars beyond the stars. I was like, is that the Milky Way? Well you’re in the Milky Way. And then, yeah, I convinced Christy it was the Milky Way. And then we came home and Lily’s like, “Dad, you’re in the Milky Way.” She was like, those are nebulous, is what she said. Did she say nebulous? No, she said supernovas, that’s what she said. Like, all the– Supernova is an event. But this is just more stars, right? You can see, it was a whole band across the sky, like one band of more stars, right? Yeah, you know what– Like the Milky Way. By the time I record mine, I’ll tell you what it is. I’ll know definitively. ‘Cause I saw, ’cause you don’t see that at all in Los Angeles. You don’t need to think about the stars. It was mesmerizing. And I didn’t, you know, like I said, we were just watching it like a movie and we were just, it was a highlight, it was amazing. And then– Did you see, we’ll talk about aliens, but did you see, when it’s that clear and you have that big of an expanse. If you look for long enough, you start seeing. Shooting stars. Shooting stars. Yes, we were both looking up and we saw the same shooting star and it was like, “Whoa, we just saw that.” So like seeing a shooting star together and just talking about how, okay, first of all, a shooting star is not a star it’s not to star at all, a shooting stars is a meteor. No shooting stars is the Milky Way . It’s like, just to see this, to both see a shooting star, to see this meteor– It’s almost like, what’s the movie where the– It’s serendipity to share that– Is it Fievel American Tail. Is that where when you’re both looking at the same. It’s just like that. It’s just like that. It’s like a red ’cause now we were next to each other. Is it Fievel or Fiefel? Fievel. Fievel. And then we watched the stars, we had eaten, it was time to start bend down for the night. And then I realized, and I had this thought in the back of my head, but it’s not the type of thing that I wanted to say as part of my intention. And I wanted to hold on loosely because you don’t wanna attach too many expectations and you don’t, a lot of things have to line up for certain things to happen. I’m interested where you’re going with this. But that night it was like, you know what? You’re not trying to have a fourth kid are you? Because you’re not capable of that. No, that’s not what this is about. That’s exactly what this about. I’m talking about getting into the van and saying, “You know what, I brought some mail, “you brought some mail. “I think we need to sort this mail.” Yeah, right. We should sort this mail. The back doors of this van are open. There’s a nice space here where we can lay out all the mail and sort it. Hold on, this is the first of the last night. This is the first night. I’m about to say hopefully this didn’t wait until the last night before this figured out this could happen. This is this first night. And I knew it could happened, but I just– You know it can happen. I just never know, a lot of things have to line up to say, you know what, it’s a good time to sort the mail. And if you’re making a lot of adjustments to a place, the last thing you wanna do sometimes is sort the mail. And you got to have an internet connection. So you can look at the wikiHow and know how to do it again. Now I remember how to the mail. And we just felt like– For those of you who didn’t listen to that episode, sorting the mail is having sexual intercourse. That’s for them to find out. Yeah, so we embark on sorting the mail. It turns out we both brought mail that needed to be sorted. That’s important, both of you have to be sorted. Right, yeah. It just can’t be one person. Right, right. That’s very selfish. Yeah, it’s like both peoples, I mean, if you both bring mail, you should both sort it. It should both be sorted. Did you sort hers first? Sort each other’s mail. ‘Cause you should really saw hers first, don’t be one of those guys. Well I mean, it’s like you, if you wanna categorize your mail, then you like put it into stacks and then you might sort some, okay. Some of your mails over here I’m gonna sort– What are the stacks? Am a sort sort of, we sorted some of her mail sorted, some of my mail, then sorted the rest of her mail and then sorted– Yeah, yeah, you don’t wanna do all sorting. You wanna mix it up. And then– Just make sure that– You wanna save a little bit of my mail to sort last. But the thing is is once you’ve sorted your mail, you don’t wanna sort anymore mail. That’s why the male, the males mail is sorted last. I was like, it felt like two teenagers, like going off into the woods in a van. We never got to do that. And it’s like– We never got to go parking. I mean, not that teenagers even cared about their mail, but you know what I’m saying, I mean, it felt like teenagers sorting mail. It was just– I cared a lot about mail. And then I started thinking is this, is the purpose of this van, this is a rental van. Is the purpose of this rental van so that people can take it and go off into the wilderness and sort their mail? That’s why I wash it so much. Are other people’s sorting their mail right here. That why they tell you we’ve really, really, really rinsed it down. I started to get freaked out. Of what? I wasn’t even done sorting in the mail and I’m starting to get freaked out about thinking about other people sorting their mail in the van. Well, have you ever been to a hotel? And then I thought about the hotel thing and I’m like, but it feels different ’cause it’s tighter in here. And there’s, I don’t know, it just felt a little different, okay. And then I started thinking, you know what, you’re overthinking this, actually continue to overthink it. And you’ll come through the other side, here goes. A lot of people wanna sort the mail. They think, you know what, I’m going camping. Am a bring all this mail am a sort. Were you talking about this out loud or just thinking about it? No, too smart for that. That distracts from– But the point here, you’re not good at doing two things at once. So I can only imagine that your mail sorting was suffering significantly at this point. Well, that’s not the only thing I had to take a break for. I mean, it was so, I was so parched. I had to keep my water bottle up by my pillow so that in the middle of the night I could reach over. I could grab my water bottle– Why don’t you just sleep in a camelback? And it’s a good idea, I do have one. If you just would sleep in a camelback and you can put it on your front, so you don’t accidentally sleep on your stomach. Yeah, I don’t sleep on the bladder. It’s a camel front, you should get, you should make a camel front. Or I could just run us a straw from my water bottle, into my mouth and not have to wear anything because that’s basically why I had a tank of water. And then– That’s gonna spill. At one point, we were like, we were sorting, we’re doing a good job of sorting, like at a certain point it’s like, wow, I really know where everything goes now. Now that you’re 42. And then I look up and I see my water bottle and I grab it and I start drinking water. And then Christy is like, “You can’t take a water. “You’re taking a water break “in the middle of our mail sorting?” Only Link Neal will take a water break. I was like, I’m so parched like your nose, like my nose is still running a little bit because it was so trying to moisten itself. And like everything got so dry. My mouth was so dry. Oh gosh. Yeah, but– I started to feel better about– You get a drink before and after not during. Yeah, lesson learnt but I was, so I started to freak about other people sorting the mail. And then I realized, you know what? A lot of couples they get out here and like one of done, one I was like, “I didn’t bring my mail,” but the other ones like “I didn’t bring my mail.” It’s like, again, you both need to bring mail to be sorted if you really want this thing to work out. I think most people, one person will be thinking, “Oh, we’re going in this van, I’m definitely bringing mail.” But both of them, maybe not. I think most people when they’re packing everything and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I know I’m gonna forget something.” At that point, even before they left on their trip, they say, “You know what? “I ain’t got room for mail,” and they don’t even bring it. So then I started to feel better. I think that we broke in that van. So you’re telling me that you are trying to take comfort in the fact, which I believe is not a fact, which is a false assumption, that other people have not had sex in this van. That’s just not, that’s, most couples who go camping have sex with each other. I never had. You haven’t been camping with your wife before. You just said that at the top of this. Well, you may be right and you know what, I need to get my own van. Okay. I was okay with it. You should get your own van for other reasons. We didn’t discuss this, it’s just happened in my mind. I’m only discussing it with you because I knew this is where it would land. I just, I think maybe what you should realize at this point is that you have probably had sex in many different places where other people have had sex. And most likely– Can you say mail? No, because I think that you’re, I think that we had talked about this directly at this point. I think that the analogy is fun but I think that it may be making you think incorrectly about it. Sometimes an analogy you can get to vivid. Yeah, It’s like I have to wear a Postal outfit. I think that we need to now be using literal terms. So next time you have sexual intercourse with your wife. In a place that is not your home, you need to assume that another couple has also had sexual intercourse in that place– And that’s fine. And you need to be okay with that. I was okay enough with it to finish the job. Not without taking a water break though. It’s totally unrelated. And then I was like, man I hope we’re not close to other people like when we camp other nights, because I don’t wanna be thinking, “Are they over there sorting their mail?” Do they think that we’re over here sorting our mail? Does it matter? To me that that’s a more relevant question, right? Especially with the van doors open. ‘Cause what I found is that there is a sweet spot. I’m not talking about sorting mail. I’m talking about where you’re, wherever you find a place to boondock, which is not another word for sex. It’s just means, it sounds like one though. But it does. Boondocking complete, initiating docking sequence. Well, I mean, ’cause if you think about it– Yeah, you dock. Boon is a pretty good name for it. And docking is the perfect word. Boondocking in the boondocks, that’s what I did, man. Wow, boondocking. Boondocking just means camping. Disperse camping is the official term on like the national forest websites. But to me, there’s a sweet spot. You don’t wanna be in an established campground because you’re too close to people. But as I will explain thoroughly in my episode– Other people don’t care? No being too remote presents itself with a new set of problems. There is a sweet spot in which you’re alone. But you kinda know where that other family is. And we knew there was another couple, like the first place we went to and that like, we could barely see them if we look through the trees in a certain way, like, I mean, like over a mile away, I had made contact with people and then I found out another side. You can have a conversation with yourself in my case. You can play your own music. You’re not thinking about, like if you need to like walk to the side of the campsite and piss on a tree or something like that, you can do all this freely. But so I obviously I wasn’t thinking about boondocking or sorting the mail because I was alone. So the question for you would be, was that on your mind, like, could someone be watching and does that, would that bother you? Well, we had already, because we didn’t wanna shower in the shower. Like I said, we showered out in the open using the garden hose that had hot and cold water, just pick it right there at the back of the van. Like we did like a full on shower there. Like shampoo, I had my freaking loofa baby. You brought a loofah? I brought a loofah. Okay, all right. I took a naked shower. Exfoliator. I took a naked shower and– It’s great, it’s great. In the valley. Bring a loofah? Oh no, I don’t bring, I don’t have a loofah to bring, now we you– I don’t why there was judgment in that statement. When you go to– I gotta get to my scary story too. Well just quickly answer this. Do you go, when you go to a hotel that is like a high rise in New York City for instance. And one of the walls is a window. And it faces across to another building that has a similar setup. And you’re in it, the time to sort the mail comes. Do you close the windows or do you put on a show? I think, I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I think I’m, I think it depends on, I don’t know. There’s a lot more variables in like what I actually see out of the window and how close it is. Well, yeah, so– If I can see other people walking around and if they were nude, I could see them. Like I usually, we’ll wait, usually if you turn off most all the lights I leave the windows open. See, I have not been able to convince– So it’s darker. I haven’t been able to convince my wife of this yet. But my personal philosophy in this situation is if I can look to an opposing building and I can see that there’s people. But I could not identify them without a set of– The position they were in. I could identify the position. And I could tell, okay, there’s a long haired man and a woman or whatever you know, but not, “Hey, there’s Rhett having sex with his wife,” without the assistance of like some sort of binoculars or something. I am on team– Open window. Open window. Open shower curtain. Because I’ve– But when the lights are off in the room– No, I’m team lights on open window. No, you’re not. Lights off man. Lights on. Okay, all right, that’s okay. I wanna see what’s happening. But then you’re encountering resistance from your mate. She is, she’s not completely close to the idea? She also thinks that like, she also thinks that like everyone can hear and see everything. She thinks that everyone else on earth is Superman in terms of how well they can see in here. You know what I’m saying? I mean, you gotta ease into it, leave the curtain open, but turn the light off, man. Just that you need just enough light to read what the mail says so you can sort it. You gotta know where it goes. If I had to choose between lights on or window open, I would choose lights on because I mean– I like a nice candle lights or like a nice ambient light– I don’t mean like fluorescence. I’m talking about like the bathroom light is on– I’m not talking about like commercial kitchen lighting. I’m talking about like, I wanna be able to see everything, but also if it’s a little bit dim, everything is, you’re both that much more flattering to one another. Yeah, but completely dark, no. No, not completely, I mean ambient lighting– I don’t want it to be fuzzy. Ambient lighting does not allow for anyone across the skyscraper to watch you. But having people across the skyscraper watch you can, in my thinking, I never experienced it could be an enhancement just for every once in a while. Okay, all right, yeah. All right, I wanna hear your story though. It’s not that I want to cut that conversation short, this is, I don’t have anything to say. It’s like, okay, you know and I’m not, am a let just thumbs up. Well, my favorite part about these conversations is that after we have them people tweet at my wife and then I get home and she’s like, “What did you talk about? “What were you talking about?” We prerecorded these, it was so long ago I don’t remember that. So it was our, this story happens and it is not a story. This is a true event. A matter of fact, I wrote down what happened. So I wouldn’t forget any of it. And to lend credibility to it. I didn’t wanna forget anything. And Christy had a more direct experience with a key part of this. So I wanted to make sure that her story came through correctly and not in any way, embellished. This is how the things happened. We’d gotten pretty good at camping by our last night. Like I said, we went outside of Vegas. We were looking forward to finding a campsite earlier and then also leaving later the next morning, like to really be at a leisurely pace and still be able to get home before I have to return this thing at five o’clock. So we went up into this Lovell Canyon Road. It’s actually, it’s a road in the middle of nowhere on the backside of that mountain range that overlooks Las Vegas. You can’t see anything. I mean, it took a long time to get up there. Once you’re gonna, once you get on that road, it goes for miles up into this picturesque valley. And then there’s an occasional gravel pull off to the side with where people could camp. We saw a couple of people, but the one I was going for was way far in there. And we wanted cell service. So I went, as far as we could go, we lost cell service. Then we came back and I saw one campsite that was up on this berm in the middle of this valley, this amazing berm where we drove off of, it was actually a paved road. Did I say that it was like, it was asphalt the main road through the thing. So it was like accessible, more accessible than other places. But then once you go off of that on the dirt road, like I was like, I’m gonna put it in four wheel drive because I just don’t know like going over these rocks. It was not a smooth road at all. It wasn’t a gravel road, it was borderline off-road off-roading right there. But it wasn’t far that we would go off the paved road, we would go up this berm, maybe 400 yards. And there was a campsite that had this amazing vista on both sides. We had cell service, but I looked, and there was down a little saddle, further on the off-roading and back up like 200 yards away. There was another, it dipped down and went back up and there was another berm. And so I drove over there and it just wasn’t flat enough. I’d learned that like, if you don’t park flat, you don’t sleep flat and that’s, it really compromises your ability to sleep. Did they not give you the little blocks to balance? No, no blocks. I took those with me. Those proved to be– I underestimated, like people are leaving reviews about like the campsite is flat and I’m like, I will support it. For a tent that’s really important. But when you have a van or you got the rooftop tent, I just bought like 30 bucks on Amazon, these blocks that you can stack and all these different ways. And I use them literally every single night to get under multiple wheels to get it exactly. It became this mission to get the exactly flat. Because you sleep a lot better, if you’re sliding, especially with two people and you’re like smooshing somebody, that’s not good. So we left that outermost berm, we came back 200 yards down the saddle back up to this other berm and then we set up shop there. Sun was still, it was like four o’clock. We have plenty of time to enjoy everything. We had, it was like 360 degree view. You’re cooking inside the van? No, we’re cooking on the, there’s a burner in there, but then we cooked it on top of the, that propane tank outside. Like we had a big rectangular skillet. We ate breakfast for dinner that night. ‘Cause we had, it was our last night and we had eggs and bacon, Christy made the bacon, she fried the bacon and it’s spelled Link, she’s knows the way to my heart. Wow. Yeah, pretty great, huh? We’re having a great time, we’re listening to Sea Change by Beck. That’s a big pan or small bacon. Yeah, the pain was this big. And then the sun’s going down and some, I think there is some smoke residue or it might’ve just been so hot, the ambient heat, it created this amazing effect on the sunset. And I was like, literally the most amazing sunset we’ve ever seen. Like it was wonderful, we were having the time of our lives. And then we ate dinner as it was getting dark. And then because she made the dinner, I was on dish duty inside of the camper. And she was sitting outside, I think reading something by or like on her phone. ‘Cause she had service. And by this point it’s dark. It’s like nine o’clock, okay. And I’m like finishing up washing the dishes, and earlier in the day before it got dark, we heard a car coming up the road and it was again, it was still light. And so I stepped out of the camper to just let them know that like, “Hey, there’s two people here.” And I’m gonna suss out these people going by. People coming up the dirt road. Yeah, coming up the dirt road. And they had to go right beside our van to then go down that little thing to go to that next site that we decided not to take. Well really early on one guy along with a rooftop tent went there, he parked and we’re like, “Oh man, is he gonna say,” we can’t shower there now. ‘Cause he would see us. He stayed there for five minutes then he left, later on– Yeah, you can’t be crowding people, man. It’s a freaking desert, there’s all kinds of– Later on it’s almost sunset this other man and it looked like his teenage daughter came through and then they went up and checked out the same spot. And then we’re like watching and we could see them. We could see and they got out of their car and they set up a tent and they stayed. So we were a little bit bound, but like we were facing the other direction and they were on the other side of the van, like I said, 200 yards away on another berm. So we still felt like we had pretty good privacy. And then sun went down, we ate our dinner, it’s nine o’clock at night. I’m inside washing the dishes, she’s outside on her phone. And all of a sudden I hear gravel and I see like headlights hit the side of our van and a car is creeping up the dirt road coming right up to us. And like I’m in there washing. And the car comes past my field of view and stops where I can’t see the car. I can’t see who’s driving the car or anything. I can just see the tail of the car from where I was washing the dishes, but I could see Christy and she could see this car of course. ‘Cause she was out there in the open. And then the car stops– Right next to you. Right next to the back of our van. And I hear a guy say to Christy, “Are you selling any hot dogs?” And Christy said, and I freeze. And I’m like, “What the hell is this guy asking about hot dogs?” And I’m like, I literally freeze and I’m like just listening. ‘Cause it was hard for me to hear. But my instinct was just to listen. So let me just, here’s the exchange. “Are you selling any hot dogs?” And then I hear Christy say, “Nope, we actually don’t have any.” And then the guy says, “I’m going around getting people to vote, “vote on my pictures, to see which ones they like best.” And I’m still listening and then Christy goes, “No, thank you, we’re not interested.” And she was like really has a friendly voice. And then the guy said, “I just need you to vote on the photos. “See I have them right here.” And I can’t see him and then Christy– Hold on and you’re still– Christy stood up. You’re still in the kitchen? I’m still in the kitchen frozen. Like washing, like you gotta be out there at this point. In retrospect I was trying to figure out why, it was a frightened? Was I frozen with fear? Was I being strategic? Being strategic. I think all of these were having, because my initial thing was– The strategic hesitation. It’s not basketball. I was trying to assess the situation, I was freaked out. I was like, what the heck is going on? Like when the people came around earlier, I had come out and show my face. But my instincts told me to sit back here. Christy is gonna, I need to do whatever it takes to deescalate the situation. This guy seems strange. A little. Very strange. And I think I was just like, Christy is going to politely get this guy to drive off. If I go out there and like say something, I might say the wrong, I had this instinct that I was gonna say the wrong thing. And I will say– You might escalate. I had had a couple, okay? Okay. So I wasn’t, I was just trying to know my limitations and I was like, I might go out there and I might be aggressive or I might try to scare the guy, you know how I do. And that is your MO when you enter into weird situations like that and you come in pretty aggressive and pretty strong. And if I had it, yeah, I escalate things. And if I’ve had a few, I speak louder. And so I think I didn’t have enough that I didn’t know that about myself. So my instinct told me Christy’s gonna deescalate this. I’m gonna stay back here and then I can assess what I need to do when the time is right. So, I mean, he’s like, “I’m going around getting people to vote on my pictures, “to see which ones they like best.” And then Christy’s like, “No, thank you, we’re not interested.” And then he said, “I just need you to vote on the photos. “See I have them right here.” And then Christy told me that he holds up like four by six photos. It wasn’t on a phone, it was literal photo. He had printed out photos and he was, of course he’s in the driver’s seat. He’s leaning over the passenger seat, trying to lure Christy close to the car to show her the pictures. How old is this guy? What does he look? Christy said, it’s very dark. Again, there’s no moon. We had turned most of our lights off– You’re way out there. We’re way out there, yes. And Christy was like, “Ah, well, no, we’re just wrapping up dinner.” And then she said she couldn’t see his face that well, but it was just, it was one guy in the car and it was like a, it was a hatchback car. It could have been like a Subaru Outback type thing that could have gone on this off-roading part. But if you’re in a car and you go slow enough, you can, you could navigate it. And so it was just a hatchback that’s all we could tell. He was, he’s leaning from the driver’s side. So she can’t really see his face, but it’s just some white dude. I mean, she couldn’t describe him more than that. And then he’s like, she’s like, “We were just wrapping up dinner.” And so she said, he was like, “Okay.” And he throws his hand up in the air, like whatever. And then he slowly keeps going past us– To the other people– Down into that thing in an up to those next people. And at that moment that he drove away, Christy, I’m still in the kitchen, Christy comes in there and she’s visibly freaking out and I’m also freaking out. And like, our eyes are so wide and it was like, we were like, what just happened is what we seem to be saying to each other without actually saying words. And I was just like, she was like, “Was this guy trying to, “this guy was trying to lure me to the car.” I was like, “Yeah, I didn’t know if I should go out there “or if I should wait, “but it felt like you were handling it.” And I was like, “I just didn’t, “I just wanted him to go away. “And it seemed like you were doing a good job of that.” And she was like, and I was thinking, “We gotta get outta here.” He’s going to these, this guy’s unpredictable. He maybe unstable– Did you have a knife or anything? I wasn’t thinking of that at the time I have one of those like five and one tools that has a knife in it. I have a giant knife. Like a hunting knife that’s like 12 inches long. And I kept it in my tent every night just in case trouble came. Yeah, yeah, well, let me tell you, I gotta rethink some things. To think things through on another level, because at this point I’m thinking in my mind, I know Christy wants to get the hell out of dodge. And I’m also thinking– He’s got to come back by you, right, because– We knew that he had to come back by us once he was done– Once the dad and the daughter were done judging the photos. Yes or once he’s done like killing and eating them, there is a dead end, he has to come back by us. So we were freaking out that we knew he was coming back by. Also you still got a cell service. Did it hit you that maybe you should call the police at that point. Christy said, let’s call the cops. And I’m like, “Let’s not call the cops yet, “let’s not panic.” And I just didn’t feel like, I don’t know. I just didn’t wanna call the cops. We can put a, let’s put a pin in that. Okay, I’m not saying that you definitively should have called the cops at that point. Christy was talking about let’s call the cops, there was a debate. There’s odd, there’s something not right about this guy. There’s several things not right about this guy. So Christy was like, “You need to pack everything up “so that when he comes back through, we can be ready. “We can be in the van, locked up and we can, “if we need to leave, we can just leave.” So I was like, listen Christy, and we turned off all the lights in the van so that we could see through our little window. We watched him drive down there to those other people, with all of our lights on. We couldn’t see him that well so we’re like– How easy is it to pack up? We doused everything and then I was like, “Christy, you look out at this window “and you keep your eyes glued to this guy. “If he starts coming back, you let me know “while you don’t take your eyes off of his car lights. “I’m gonna get everything cleaned up.” And then I went out there and I got, the propane tank had just, propane burner had just cooled down enough to put it in the car, the propane tank, our chairs, the cooler, I’m scrambling putting everything away in the pitch dark without any lights on. And then I put everything back in and I come back in and she’s like, “He still there.” Yeah, I mean, he’s got a lot of photos to go through.” He’s still there, I don’t, you know, did he, did he kill both of them? I don’t know, what’s he doing? Is he putting on their skin as a suit? I don’t know what’s happening, but I’m thinking if we, and I asked Christy, this is like, “If we’re watching a movie of us right now, “what would we be saying to our characters? “Get the hell out of here.” Yeah, but in the movie that you would definitely have judged the photos because of what, I mean, that’s what would be more fun for a plot. Well, really, let me see your photos. Christy would have, Christy did stand up I think, but she did not walk towards the man with the photos. We knew he was coming back and we’re like, I don’t wanna be the people in the movie that I’m gonna be angry at. We need to be ready to leave. So like we locked up the van, we locked up everything. And then all of a sudden that the car starts moving and it starts creeping back. And because of the terrain, it had to go so slow. And it went down in that berm and it came up and we’re looking out the back two windows of the van where he would drive right past us. And he drives and he gets, comes right up to the van and then keeps going slowly. And he goes down below the van and he gets back to the paved road and we could still see him. And he stops there at the paved road and he doesn’t, he has to turn right or left. He doesn’t turn anywhere. He sits there for a long time and I’m like– Like how long? It felt like 10 minutes. Like he was like, I don’t know, what is he blocking our only exit. Like we’re cowering in this van locked up. And then he turns left and we like watch him go down into the canyon. And then we watched him go up on another berm where a long ways away, we saw that there was another camper and it’s like, Christy is like, “We need to get out of here.” And it was like, she was like, you’ve, you can’t drive. It’s like, “You don’t wanna get a DUI.” She didn’t want her first experience driving the sprinter van to being off road, so then it’s like, you just need to like, you just need to just take some time. How long do you think it’s gonna take you for you feel like you can drive and I’m like, “Ah, an hour.” And then like, we’re just sitting there in the dark freaked out. You can see, you can still see, you can kinda see where he went. I see that he went to another site and then like over 20 minutes of processing this I’m like, you know what? It’s a paved road down the middle of this thing. This guy’s a little off, but I bet you, he comes up in here and tries to sell his pictures to campers. And I’m like, Christy, he said, “I’m not trying to sell you anything “I just want you to vote on my pictures.” But then when you said, “I like this one best I’m voting for this.” He would say, “I’ll sell it to you for 5 dollars.” ‘Cause it was like pictures of like nature. Wasn’t pictures of him like posing? Yeah, yeah. Which would have been especially weird. It wasn’t like you and like a New York City exhibition. Right, yeah. In your bedroom. So I’m like, this guy is just a strange guy who likes to sell his pictures to like campers in the pitch black of night. Yeah, not a great strategy. And then she’s like, “Well, I would feel better if we went “and talked to that other couple.” And I’m like, “If we drive up there, “there’s no place to turn around “because of where they parked, “I can’t turn this van around.” That’s probably why it took him so long up there because he couldn’t turn his car around and I’m trying, I’m like, I’m getting my wits about me now. I’m not freaking out as much. And I’m trying to deescalate how scared Christy is. And I’m like, and then we start, so we start walking down into the ravine, up to where this other camping group is, the dad and the daughter. And we get halfway there and like you can hear someone’s on a laptop or like watching a show or something. But then it’s like, it’s so dark out there and I’d just had a headlamp. And I was like, “We’re gonna freak them out by going up there.” And we just, we got too scared to walk up to them. And we turned around and walked back and we were like, I’m scared, we were like, laughing. Christy had not had anything by the way. She was just like, she’s just predisposed to be freaked out by this stuff. And she doesn’t like to drive off road, which stuck us in this middle ground where like huddled back at the van, afraid this guy’s gonna come back. And I’m like, listen, this is fine. She was, “I really would feel better “if we talked to this other people.” So we walked out there again. Did you make it this time? We get halfway and we get scared again and we come back. Hold on, you’re scared– I don’t know, we were just so freaked out that we didn’t wanna go– Scared of freaking them out, ’cause I get that. We were scared of freaking them out. What if after all this, like that guy has a knife or a gun. And like, he’s trying to protect his daughter. And we’re the ones who get caught in the crossfire or something. ‘Cause we freaked him out and we were gonna yell at him and then it’s like, you don’t want to yell. “Hey, we want to talk to you about that guy “that tried to get you to judge the photos.” We go back and I’m like, “Listen, everything is fine. “We’re locked up in this van–” And you sleep inside the van. We sleep inside the van, it’s locked up. So we got calm and we’re like, we’re just gonna chill out here. And then we’re like, we’re here, I mean, we’re just bedding down for the night. I got some mail. This is not a great time. We could sort some out. You know what, surprisingly enough, there was enough mail on both sides to sort that it actually, sometimes when you clean up, it gives you a sense of control. I think sometimes sorting the mail gives you a sense of release. Well, it’s like a gorilla, when a gorilla is trying to– Express dominates. Dominate another gorilla, gets an erection and shows it. And it’s actually way smaller than you would expect for a gorilla. ‘Cause you would know that like anyone who’s really scared can’t get an erection. If there are even not even just a gorilla, like I’m talking about me now. So being able to get an erection and use it, is actually the ultimate show that you’re completely relaxed. We were completely relaxed, we were over it. In fact, come on back, let me buy some of your photos. And then, so then I was feeling pretty good. And we were like getting everything, like I probably got a drink of water and I got up and it’s like, all of a sudden, the sliding door on the van begins to open. Now it’s a big electric sliding door. So it’s like, you pull the handle and then it like goes out and then it slowly, and it was dirt, so it took a while for it to open. I did not, the keys were up in the front where I’d locked the van. Christy didn’t have them, we didn’t touch any buttons that would have opened the door. 100%, we did not do anything to open the door. But here we are, the door is opening and I’m standing there looking out the door as it’s opening, waiting to see this guy standing there, it scared the shit out of me. And also Christy, like she literally had to go to the bathroom. Once we found out there was no one standing there. I don’t know why the door opened. But there was, my theory is there’s some sort of voice command that connects to like the entertainment system. You didn’t know about the voice command? And I don’t think that the voice, sometimes it would come on. Kind of like, hey, when you say, “Hey Siri,” so it’s, but I don’t have any proof that that would actually work with the van. Maybe we, it wasn’t locked all the way and when I showed– Had you said like open? No, I was, I did not want the door to open. I’m so open right now. There was nothing on the other side of that van door except blackness, it was so dark. It scared me, but– You expected the guy to be standing there with two photos. Yeah, he wasn’t there. Which one do you like, just tell me. And then Christy, at this point Christy wasn’t freaking out. And I was like, I think it was the voice thing because something lit up on the entertainment consol, I was lying. And so she was fine and she wasn’t freaking out about it. So then I closed the door back and then I made sure everything was locked. And then we laid back down in the bed and Christy kept looking at those, she was looking through the window, but like I rolled over and went to sleep. I don’t know how long I was asleep. Christy said I was snoring, but she was wide awake and looking out the window. And then what I woke up to was Christy grabbing my thigh. This story is still going. Yes. She grabbed my thigh and it was probably 10:30 at this point. I woke up out of asleep and like eyes wide open, headlights shining through the back of the van in my face. Did you immediately recognize the same headlights? And I couldn’t see cause it was headlights. And then the car is creeping towards us and coming right up to our van. And then it slowly goes by and it’s the same car. It’s a hatchback. I will say for a fact, it’s a hatchback car and it keeps going by and we are freaking out. I mean every time that we’ve been freaking out this whole time with all the lights off Christy and I’ve been whispering to each other, we haven’t been talking to loud voice. We’ve been like, whispering, like what do we do? And it was like, “Oh shit, I think that’s, “I don’t think it’s the same car.” I’m like telling Christy I’m like, that’s a different car. It’s boxier. Yeah boxier. I’m lying. I’m thinking this is the same freaking car, this is picture man. And he goes by us, he knows this, a dead end. He goes down into that saddle and then I can barely see his car stop, brake lights. He doesn’t go up to the, to those people. His car stops down in the bottom 100 yards from us and 100 yards from them. And then all of a sudden the lights in the car go off and I’m waiting for the interior, I’m waiting for the interior light to come on, when the car door opens. They don’t. It doesn’t. He’s bending down. It’s totally black. And then we just sat there for a long time, just watching to see if there’s any signs of this guy getting out of his car ’cause I’m like, and then I’m like, I sat up and I’m like, just keep watching. I’m getting in the driver’s seat. And we’re getting the hell out of here. And I got in the driver’s seat and I backed that puppy up. And we drove out of there because the guy was just there, at any moment, he could have got out of the car, walked up there and made a skin into a suit, my skin into a suit. You have no choice, now– And so we drove down to the end of the road where we pulled off the main road and we were still in a place where, we just parked over there. We saw someone else camping, we camped kinda near them. We just parked and we felt much better and we slept that night and got up the next morning. But I wanted to go ride back up there and see if anybody was still up there. But we didn’t do it. ‘Cause what about the dad and the daughter? Well they were alive the first time he left and then the second time he didn’t go back up there. But like he might’ve blocked them in. That’s the scaredest I’ve ever been. And it was like multiple freaking parts to it. And maybe we should call the ranger even now and tell him, “Hey, heads up. “There’s some dude with pictures.” If there’s a, I don’t have much of a description, but– Maybe this is what’s happening with this guy. Maybe years ago he made a deal with the devil of sorts. And now every night he has to piss– My armpits are starting to sweat again. He has to get someone to buy one of his photos or else he turns into a pumpkin. And I think what happened is, is that either he succeeded or he didn’t, and he goes back to that spot. And if you had to stuck around until midnight, you would have seen him turn into a pumpkin. What do you think really happened though? I think the guy was a little off, but he was just trying to make scratch, selling these pictures of nature. And I’m dying to know what he said to those people, but I was too scared to walk up there and I’m mad at myself. And what did they, did they see him coming up? ‘Cause I mean, if they were freaked out, then they see this guy come down and stop at the bottom of the ravine. You think that they knew that he was there? Yeah, they definitely would have seen him. And he’s on the road. ‘Cause they can’t get around him. Yeah, I did a bad thing, did I? We abandoned these people. Those people got boxed in by this guy, who knows what, and this just happened two nights ago, you might need to look at the news. And it might be like father and daughter murdered by crazed photo man outside of Las Vegas. And if happened– While other couple of sorts of mail in the close vicinity. And now you’ve told your whole story, which includes, well, we saw him, we got a little bit scared. We had sex and then we left. No, he came back. You have no alibi at this point. You don’t really need an alibi ’cause you, but I mean, you definitely are an accomplice to this. I don’t like calling the cops because I didn’t wanna like trouble them. They got things to worry about other than that, it’s like, and I couldn’t describe my exact location. I was like, well, we’re up to canyon road and we still have cell service. So we’re not too far in, but we’re not, we’re really far in. It’s one of those situations and I’m not saying I would have, I don’t think I would have acted any differently, but it’s one of those things that you wish you could go back. And the moment that he shows up, you could just say something like, “Hey bro, let’s talk about this. “You understand what you’re doing “is very weird and threatening. “It’s dark, we’re out here in the middle of nowhere. “You’re asking these weird questions about selling hotdogs “and then asking us to judge your photos. “This makes my wife and I feel unsafe.” “Oh, well, in that case, let me shoot you in the face “and turn your skin into a suit.” I don’t think that would happen, I think the reaction would be, “Oh, you’re right, I’m not crazy anymore.” No, no, they’d be crazy but you would at least say, “So dude, go away or I’m gonna call the police.” I’m not saying I would have done that going in, but if this ever happens to meet to me now, that’s what I’m gonna do. I feel more prepared now I would have gone out there and I would’ve said something. Here’s the thing that I’ve learned whenever you’re out there camping. And there are people going by, like when that dad and daughter went by, I probably would have waved them down and had a conversation because that way it’s like, I have an assessment of who these people are on this next berm. And then I would have confidence if I needed to, if I needed help or if I needed to check on them, I know I’ve confidence that I know who they are. That was part of why I was scared to go over there. ‘Cause I didn’t, I don’t know that it was a dad daughter. It was like, it was a weird age difference. Yeah, but– So, you know. Maybe that’s what they do. I don’t know, it’s, maybe this, maybe the photo person was with them and they spent a lot of time there and they were like– They’re a team, huh? It’s not a very effective plan. They need to work on their strategy. I don’t know what the end game is. I can get better at being ready for this type of thing. And then again, not escalating it. The main thing is like, after I was like, as it was happening, I was like, “Okay, if we don’t die, “this is the end of me and Christy “ever going camping again.” And I was mad. Yeah, that guy ruined it. But you know what? She actually took it in stride with our entire trip and all the other things that happened and– And at least it happened the last night. We had a positive experience– If it happened in the first night– So many positive experiences that it, that this scary thing did not outweigh it. So just to kind of shut this down in a positive place, I’m not saying I’m definitely gonna buy one of these off-road sprinter van outfits because I’ve got three kids and there’s a lot of problems associated with that. Space was of a premium let me tell you. How many people could you comfortably take on a trip. We could have brought Lando and there’s one place that could lay out where he could sleep in a separate bed. But also– But you could do a rooftop tent or just set up a tent. Take a tent. Yeah. ‘Cause my rooftop tent is rated for three people, but they would be very small people. So I think I could either have Jessie or one of the kids. And so I was like, “Well, I’ll just take an extra tent, “put it on the ground.” If that guy would have been on the other side of that sliding door, like I have no explanation for why it opened, but that, I’ve never been so scared as that moment. That’s why you gotta have a knife, man. That’s why I was yeah, like, and I needed to have that knife in my hand. I had bear spray, had a bull horn and a giant knife. I, yeah, I’ve never been more scared than at that moment because like, I just remember the feeling of peering over into the darkness as the door. It could not have opened slower. And I just knew that he was just gonna be standing there. Yeah, we’re not prepared for that kind of thing. Like, because we live in such a controlled civilized society at this point, you go back in several hundred, several thousand years. First of all, you wouldn’t be in a van because they didn’t exist. But if you hadn’t been in a van and the door opened, you would be immediately like in an aggressive, like you would have been so ready. Like you would have been punched in the air. You know what I’m saying? This is what I looked like. You’re right, yeah. You were totally, you were petrified, man. I was like sticking my neck out to be chopped. We’ve lost the ability to just take life by the horns, man. We’ve been cuddled. We should all be, we should have knives. I’m gonna have so many knives. We should have– Am a have throwing knives. We should have claw, like gloves that have claws on them. So you’re saying that Link Neal should go out into the woods ’cause playing as Wolverine. Is that a good idea? I mean you might hurt yourself and others, but you’ll also protect yourself and others. The first night, I couldn’t figure out the freaking van. This is another point of reference like, we were bend down for the night and I’m like, I can’t get the cab lights to turn off in the front of the cab, I can’t get them to turn off. I was pushing buttons everywhere. I accidentally pressed the SOS button on the Mercedes. Oh, that’s a problem. And all of a sudden I heard it– Hello can I help you. I heard a number. I heard it, it’s ringing and I’m pushing buttons and I can’t get it to stop. Well, they’ll ask you if it’s a true emergency. And then all of a sudden they were like, “Hello is an emergency” And I was like,– “No, I’m one of the 98% of the people “who accidentally press this button “that you talked to all night long.” Now what I said was, he said, “Hello, is this an emergency?” And I said, “No, but can you help me with a technical issue?” No you didn’t. And she said, “No, this is for emergency uses only.” I’m like, “Okay, well, I didn’t even mean to call you. “I just hit the number by, “hit the button by accident.” And she hung up. And then I ended up pressing the SOS button three more times by accident, trying to figure out how to turn the lights off. But she never answered again, I got blocked. Cried wolf. And then I got in bed and I’m like, “I’m sorry, Christy, the cab lights are gonna be on. “It’s going to be ambient.” And then she’s like, “I’m scared.” This is the first night, she said, “I’m scared of sleeping with the doors open “on the back of the van.” So I was like, I went around, walked outside, close the doors, ’cause that’s how you have to close them. And then as I was walking back, I was like, that’s why the damn lights were on. So then I closed all the doors and I hit the lock button and the van locked and all the lights went off. And that’s how I know that, I don’t know how that door opened for the creepy guy to not be there because I had figured it out. But everything was so hard to figure it out. But can you have the doors open and the lights off. Surely you can. You can’t hit the lock button. If you hit the lock button, the lights stay on to let you know that you didn’t actually lock your van because there’s doors gaped open. Got it, yeah. So you have to learn to speak the van’s language. Maybe I’ll get one, maybe not, but I definitely have an appreciation for going out into nature and just like, and bringing my mail. I don’t know if I ever wanna bring my kids, honestly, maybe just one kid at a time type of thing. If I have this van, I can do smaller trips too. It doesn’t have to always be. I’m trying to talk to you into talking me into this. You can come. Me and you can take the van. Yeah, but we gotta share a bed, right? I will have a different what? Put a rooftop tent on it. You can put a rooftop tent on the van. That’ll be way up there. You’re used to it. That’s true. You definitely should do it man. That may have been the scaredest I’ve ever been, period. I mean, I haven’t had anything that legitimately I, as I’ll share in my episode– I’m just trying to get people to vote on my picture. Lots of, first off I thought you’re gonna say, I’m just trying to get people to vote. I was like, “Oh, great.” That’s what I thought, I was like, this guy in the middle of nowhere. You’re trying to get out the vote. Yeah, man, whatever it takes. That’s what I thought. Every vote counts. I was so– Nevada is a swing state. Everything he said was so strange that I was just frozen in fear and lack of assertiveness. But Christy handle herself like a master. Now here’s the thing. My wife would be really mad at me. If I had behaved like you did at the beginning– I was surprised Christy wasn’t mad at me ’cause I think I deserve it. There’s this one time and she never lets me live this down. There’s this one time we were in Chapel Hill, been married for like a year and there was a homeless man who was aggressive and kinda like kinda coming at us and– You pushed her. No, I didn’t push her Take her, not me. What if that’s what I could do? Take the small one. I had seen this guy before and he was, he would get in people’s faces and– Yeah, yeah, yeah. Most of the time, the vast majority of the time, if a person in this situation gets aggressive it’s all talk, it’s all bark, no bite, right? So we’re just walking along and she is on the side that he’s, and he kinda comes at us and I just sort of looked at him and just kept walking unthreatened, but I didn’t get in front of her. And I didn’t bow up to the guy because in my mind this guy’s just a little bit nuts. He does this kind of aggressive thing. He comes up to you and then you just walk by. But for our entire marriage, she has held that against me, that in her in her mind, I pushed her to this guy. And so now I have this conscious thing where it’s just like, if we’re in a situation where someone is threatening, I’ve gotta like insert myself. But I haven’t even yet had the opportunity. Because remember that age old, the story of Christy was pregnant and the guy– Yeah, right. The guy with the football– You tend to come in a little bit hard. What are you doing. I got to swing the pendulum back. All right let me shut this down. And let me make a quick wreck. It’s my turn to make a wreck. On a, let’s see, not the last, but the AMA before that, the Mythical Society AMA we do every month. Somebody asked what I was listening to and I told them what we were listening to, am a make it a recommendation. Zephaniah Ohora, this guy channels Merle Haggard and he’s like, I mean, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know ’cause we discovered this guy. He channels Merle Haggard on these like, these vintage country music tracks, he’s out of Brooklyn. It’s pretty phenomenal. My favorite song “We Planned to Have It All,” is like a early 80s Merle. He usually goes like some of the earlier Merle, but we really liked that early 80s Merle. Not that like early 70s Merle. We love it, but that’s our sweet spot. “We Planned to Have It All is the song” that I am recommending by Zephaniah Ohora off the album, “Listening to the Music.” Oh man, I gotta get out of the sweatshirt. I just been sweating too much. And if you’re out there and you’re listening to this podcast and you have a tendency to just approach people just outside of Vegas, in the dark to get them to buy or just vote on your photos, just understand or buy people’s hotdogs. That’s your opening line. This is not a good strategy for selling your photos. You’ve frightened, you frightened at least one family that night and you’re on the verge of being reported. It hasn’t happened yet though. It hasn’t happened yet. Just know probably next time, some, the next person you approach in this way will probably call the authorities. Or stab you. And if that person is me, both those things I guess will happen ’cause now I’m ready for it. Hashtag Ear Biscuits. We’ll hear about Rhett’s amazing solitary experience next time. No, I didn’t run into that guy, spoiler alert. To watch more Ear Biscuits, click on the playlist on the right. To watch the previous episode of Ear Biscuits, click on the playlist to the left. And don’t forget to click on the circular icon to subscribe. If you prefer to listen to this podcast, it’s available on all your favorite podcast platforms. Thanks for being your mythical best.