Back in civilization?

Our month in the Dead Zone has ended. The way the on/off schedule worked out, we were off the last three days of April so we left Johnson's Shut-Ins yesterday. The park manager was at our site bright and early to pick up the 3-ring binder, keys, and radio so we were actually in Farmington well before 10 a.m. I was moderately amazed. We don't normally move quite that fast.

Of course, it helped that we'd done things like take down the patio lights and retract the awning a few days earlier. The weather forecast had called for possible thunderstorms while we'd be away from the park on our days off. We closed the awning then because we had no desire to come back and discover it had been shredded by high winds. It was probably a good move to keep it closed -- on Tuesday the park got hit by hail big enough to punch holes in two ceiling vent covers (time to invest in the metal ones Billy Cook recommended) and put a few dings in the car roof. If the awning had been out, the combination of high winds and large hail would have trashed it.

The awning is short by a foot or so now because winds ripped it while the previous owner had it. One of these days we'll get a replacement. I'd like to get a custom one -- one of the regulars at Montauk was a guy who had a Mizzou awning for his RV (he also had all the trim painted in the school colors). It struck me then that doing the proud alum thing and having the Michigan Tech logo on the awning would be kind of neat. The cost would be about the same as just ordering a regular replacement. The big drawback to doing that would be that then the rest of the Guppy wouldn't match. We'd have to have the stripes on it repainted so they'd be black and gold. That could involve more work or money than we're willing to invest. Maybe we should go with just an ordinary awning and stick with my original plan of getting a giant peel and stick guppy decal to slap on the driver's side of the beast. No repainting required, just the possibility of fielding questions from fellow campers who might be curious as to why there's a large picture of a fish on our motorhome.

But I digress. We're back in civilization, free again to see news clips of the Republicans calling each other names and to be bemused by the spectacle of one of the least likable humans on the planet picking a woman who makes the Wicked Witch of the West look warm and fuzzy in comparison to be his "running mate." And just what does Ted Cruz think he's running for other than "obscure footnote in history?" Trump's nomination seems inevitable at this point -- how do you stop a candidate who's managed to scoop up most of his party's delegates? I'll be honest: Trump scares me a lot less than Cruz does. Trump may be an egomaniac, but he's also pragmatic. He's not driven by religious ideology the way Cruz is.

As for the Democrats. . . Bernie seems to be adjusting to reality. His campaign staff is shrinking, the numbers are against him when it comes to the nomination, but he still has strong enough numbers to be in a position to help dictate what goes into the official party platform. I think he would have done better if the media had treated him seriously from the beginning, but then again. . . I've had qualms all along simply because of his age.

Of course, I have those same qualms about Hillary. The Republicans managed to find young candidates -- assholes, granted, but young -- while Democrats failed miserably at finding anyone who wasn't already eligible for Medicare. I sincerely hope that whoever the Democratic nominee is, that person pushes for a vice president who hasn't found the AARP letter in his or her mailbox yet.

We're also free to watch morning television, back to seeing "Kelly and Michael" and wondering how Kelly Ripa could sit next to Michael Strahan day after day and yet not talk with him enough offstage to know that he was leaving the show? Just how cold is their off-stage working relationship? And why should anyone actually care who is or is not on that show? It beats the alternatives at the time of day, but that's not saying much. And will Michael Strahan moving to "Good Morning America" make that show any more worth watching? I doubt it. Still, there seems to have been quite the kerfuffle over who was going where and when. Kudos to the publicists for both GMA and Kelly and Michael for being able to generate a bit of a buzz on Twitter and elsewhere over happenings that no one actually cares about.