A Shortcut To Strawberries

Here's one of the little moments you can't have when you're traveling by tour bus and don't often take advantage of when traveling by car. I'm riding along today, ahead of schedule and wondering what I'll do with my day, when I see a farm with a sign advertising fresh eggs. Hard boiled eggs are my new favorite camp food, and I have a gas canister that's nearly empty. So I stop and ask them if there's anywhere I could set up to cook.

Sure enough, the young woman working the counter takes me around the barn to the arbor, where there's a well crafted, little used picnic table in the shade. She shows me the hose tap right there on the side of the barn, where I can top off my water bottle and fill my pot to boil my eggs. I buy half a dozen and also a little tub of the most beautiful strawberries you'll ever see. We’re talking the Platonic form of strawberriness.

It turns out I still have half my dinner from last night (a box mix of Moroccan couscous with a little cucumber and tomato chopped in there), so today for lunch I have couscous, a lovely farm-fresh egg, and a small mountain of perfect strawberries. Pretty damn good for a guy who usually eats peanut M&Ms for lunch, eh?

It turns out the rest of the strawberries fit perfectly in the egg container, which, if I turn it upside down, snuggles in pretty nicely under the bungee cord over Booster's rump. Obviously storage would have been much easier in a car, but when I'm traveling by car I almost never stop for moments like this. Not at highway speed, anyway. I think I need to reconsider that.