Our Vanmate - Freddie

We've been getting a few questions about our roommate Freddie and I figured he was therefore deserving of his very own blog post - he certainly impacted us enough to deserve one.

We met Freddie in a campsite on Lake Waikaremaona where we were staying with my parents. The campsite was great, on a beautiful lake where we launched the kayak and were able to see (but not catch) the sizable brown and rainbow trout and where Andrea and I got in some decent hiking and biking... but I digress...

At first, we hardly even noticed Freddie, he was quiet, kept to himself, and wasn't an inconvenience at all. Gradually though, he started to wear on both my and Andrea's patience. It started with eating our food. Under normal circumstances, we're happy to have house guests help themselves to food, but when you're in a van and you've carefully planned your food for each meal, having components of those meals start to disappear is none too nice. And the worst part was, Freddie just sort of wasted food, starting into one item (like all the cheese off the cheese buns) and then moving onto another. And then there was his hygiene. It wasn't so much that he stank (in his defense, he really didn't), but more that he was messy and left shit all over the place. The final straw was the noise, although for most of the day we'd hardly notice Freddie around at all, at night, he'd sort of shuffle around, not talk at all, but just move about the camper. At one point, when I found him in bed with us sharing a pillow with me, I knew he had to go.

Thankfully Andrea was of the same mindset and we began to methodically plot out how we'd rid ourselves of this pain in the ass house guest. First, we started hiding the food, hoping he might get the message that way - he didn't. Second, we started switching up our destinations a bit, thinking we'd end up in a place he didn't like and maybe decide to go his own way - that didn't work either. Finally, Andrea and I had had enough - we started to plan out how to kill Freddie.

In the end, it was his love of peanut butter that did him in. After five days, four sleepless nights, and three cities, Freddie the Fieldmouse was dead (thanks in part to Andrea's ability to set a mousetrap with a hair trigger - he just stole the bait from mine two nights in a row).