Okay... so in a nutshell....

It rained!

Nine hounds showed up prepared to run, swim, climb... or whatever it would take to complete this trail. Another 5 were appearances. Meta and Iron Lung showed up merely to guard the beer while the runners were swimming on trail. We wouldn't want the beer to go floating down the nearest creek or somehting! Hey, it's happened before. Then Whiney Bitch showed up with his son and daughter. What cute little kids! It's a shame that their mother didn't tell Whiney what was so painfully obvious to the rest of us hashers.... their real father was either the Milkman... or could it be the Postman????? These kids were cute and well mannered... not loud and obnoxious. Nope. They couldn't the be offspring of our one and only beloved Whiney Bitch.

So the hare, Norman, provided us with a short but sweet chalktalk. There was to be nothing fancy. Due to the rain, the hare was setting trail totally live and would therefore be busy just staying ahead of the pack. Norman queried the pack as to what kind of trail we wanted. What a swell guy.... he aimed to please. He did point out that he had not planned on a beerstop (oooh what happened to that tradition of a beerstop?).  Blasphmemy! The eight of us that showed up to run trail were just happy that it was Norman who stepped up at the last minute to set a trail and not us. So, the concensus was that we'd like an A to A two mile trail and then back to our covered pavilion. Norman obliged that this was a Concensus Hash. Yeah.....!

So the hare was blessed and sent on his merry way. Approximately eight minutes later, the pack was on his trail. We didn't want him so far ahead of us that the trail melted away with the rain.

Some of us are so excited that the MetroLink is coming out as far as Clayton. Could St. Louis finally be moving in a forward direction? That remains to be seen. But, along with the construction of the mini-rail comes a whole lot of mud and muck. Norman took the pack on a grand tour of the soon to be route of the MetroLink. Up one muddy hill and down another. On his way down one mudslide, Blows upper half got going faster than his lower half. With no way to stop he made his lower half catch up. He was flying down that hill with poor Pornogenic in front of him. I half fell in the mud watching it all happen, but Blows narrowly avoided the collision and we were on our way again.

That was really a clever ploy on the part of the hare to slow down the pack. How fast could we possibly run with 5 pounds of mud on each shoe?

For the fist 2/3 of trail Pornogenic and I managed to stay just behind the rest of the pack. With all of her training for Alaska, Dead Squirrel was keeping up pretty well with the front of the pack.  

(I'm not quite sure why the trash ended here, I'm sure there was more ....  In the end, it was a 6 mile trail (did I mention the no beerstop thing?)

All in all it was a shitty muddy trail.

PMS