This one's for Jackie!

I don't know what made me think of this today, but the memory kept playing around in my head, so decided to add this wonderful little memory to my ramblimgs here...

When I was about 18/19 I was going to college in my hometown, studying for my first two years there before heading off to university to finish my 4 year degree.  During my second year, my good friend, Jackie, also decided to attend this college.  We were free spirits, and sometimes prone to snap decisions - usually resulting in innocent, but 'against the rules' behaviour.

On this particular day, I arrived a bit before 10:00 am for one of my first classes that day and was just parking my car outside of the college's back gates, when suddenly parking across the street from me was my friend Jackie, parking her red, 1965 Ford Falcon convertible. I think it was a Ford Falcon--it was red anyway!

 We had always had so many adventures in that car, which usually carried a bale of hay in the boot for feeding to her horse which was stabled just outside of town.

Anyway, without saying a word, I locked my car, jumped in hers and said that I could afford to skip this class if she could skip hers--it didn't take us long to decide.  We loved to go adventuring, and loved driving through the countryside, especially if the weather was good enough to put the top down.

After a short time of driving around town to check out our 'haunts' we decided to stop in at one of the local take away burger spots which was famous for its onion rings.  We went in to order, full of ourselves, ordering what we thought was 2 orders of golden Os (onion rings) and cheeseburgers--we had tried to show off and order in fast food lingo--but the sting came when we finally got our order and somehow our order had grown to 4 orders of onion rings and what seemed like a large bagful of other oddities.  (Probably the counter staff taking their revenge on us for being so stupid in our order!)

Knowing that we couldn't possibly eat this amount of food and still function, we headed off into the countryside, with the top down, and opening our bag of food, we yelled out to the wildlife as we saw it--"A Golden O for you, and a Golden O for me!"  We ended up at one of the Mississippi river access points along our route, (the river which ran through our town),  and pulled off the road to sit down with our 'mistake' of food, and share it with the fish and river creatures. 

It was a glorious sunny day, the beginning of a promising Spring after such a snowy and cold Winter.  This had all seemed like a good idea when we started off, but after finally emptying our food bag, we decided that we would drop off the bale of hay at the stables, check on Jackie's horse, and head back to class.  If I missed one more World Civilisation class, I would be never catch up!

It had been a fun spur of the moment adventure, and I suffered with onion ring over-exposure all through my 2 hour lecture that afternoon.  I imagine the people sitting around me also suffered!  But still---I wouldn't have missed the adventure for anything!  Onion rings--definitely--adventure--never!