Laffy Taffy

After I returned to our room last night after completing the last blog entry Everett and Laura reminded me of an incident that occured yesterday that I'd completely forgotten to write about. They insisted that it needed to be documented and I think they're right.

So, for the trip that we took to the Great Wall you're hiking for four hours in the middle of the day. This means that not only is it a good idea to bring ALOT of water along, but you should also pack a lunch. Not ones to miss meals, we planned far in advance for this lunch. We actually had Everett's friend Grace take us to the most Americanized grocery store I've seen in Asia where we went crazy as if we hadn't seen things like peanut butter and Nacho Cheese doritoes in years. We purchased plenty of water, a few small snacks and the makings for peanut butter and jelly tortillas for the trip.

When we got back to our room very late in the evening/early in the morning the night before the hike, Laura insisted that we needed to pack our food bag. And then she went crazy. I was already in bed. Everett was in the bathroom. And Laura was grabbing everything she could find in the room to put in the bag. At one point she started rummaging through some snacks I'd purchased a few days before, tossing them in as well.

Somewhere in the midst of this packing frenzy, she decided to "sprinkle in" (her words) about 65 small candy cubes that look like Starbursts, but taste like laffy taffy. She had purchased them a few days before and hadn't even liked them when she bought them. But for some reason she thought they'd be perfect for our trip to the Great Wall. Actually, not just perfect, she apparently thought we'd be eating them for the entire trip, from the time we woke up in the morning until we climbed in bed at night because there was no other way you could ever eat all of that laffy taffy.

The best part of this though was that Everett and I had no idea about the laffy taffy until it was time to break for lunch. At this point Everett had been carrying the pack the entire time and at one point his water bottle had begun to leak inside. The leak plus the laffy taffy was a disaster. When we pulled out lunch there was a thin film of laffy taffy on EVERYTHING - including Everett's bag. Exasperated, Everett dumped his entire bag right in the middle of the Great Wall of China. This prompted an old lady with a broom to come up and offer to sweep it up. All in all, it was a disaster. However, the debris was eventually cleaned up, lunch was eaten, and Laura was disappointed in her apparent goal to make the "Great Wall trip" the "Let's eat laffy taffy all day trip."