July 10

We both got up before Jenny and we were going to run out and play in the grass again but then Aquamarine said that we ought to try the swimming pool. She thought that we might as well use it, since we were here, and so we went between the buildings and up to the gate around the pool. There was a big white board that had lots of rules. It did say no horseplay, and neither of us was really sure what that meant but we didn’t think that it applied to us.

The water smelled funny, because humans like putting things in the water to help keep it clean. It wasn't harmful as long as you didn't drink a lot of the water.

The pool had a shallow end and a deep end, and a little barrier of buoys tied together with a rope to separate the two halves, and there were chairs where people could sit and sun themselves when they weren't in the water, although with the way the buildings were around the pool you wouldn't get a whole lot of sun-time.

I jumped off the edge and did a duck-landing, and Aquamarine just sort of flopped into the water, and we both figured out at about the same time that the shallow end wasn't really shallow enough for our legs to comfortably touch the ground.

That was okay, though.

She was a better swimmer than I was. There were some pegasuses that were good with swimming with their wings but I wasn't one of them. And at first, 'cause I hadn't been swimming in so long, I held out my wings to keep me level, which was just like having a sea-anchor on each side of me.

When I remembered to keep them tucked in, I did a lot better.

Once she'd gotten to the far end of the pool, she taunted me by saying that she thought I'd grown up on the ocean, and when I got to the edge I reminded her that it was above the ocean, not in it. I'd never claimed to be a seapony.

She let go of the side and dove to the bottom of the pool then popped up in the center, her mane completely over her eyes. So I guess she'd forgotten how to come up without blinding yourself.

Aquamarine stuck her head back under and shook her head to get her mane clear then came back up above the water with a challenge in her eyes, so I let go of the side of the pool and dove down, too. Underwater, my wings were a real asset, 'cause I could move a lot of water with them. I just had to be careful to not get carried away, 'cause that's a good way to get wing-strain.

She went down, too, and we did a little dance underwater, circling like dolphins, and then we came back up for air.

Pretty soon we were having all sorts of fun. I could tow her underwater pretty quick if she bit my tail, and in the shallow end I could stand on her back and she could flip me all the way out of the water, and once we got our timing figured out, I could do just a single flap as I came up, then tip nose-over-tail as I went over the buoys and use that turning momentum to carry through in a dive and come up back in the shallow end, next to her.

So that was a lot of fun and pretty good exercise for the morning. We finally got out of the pool when her vision started to get a little blurry from the chemical they put in the water, and I saw that they were a bit bloodshot. So she looked at my eyes and they were fine, 'cause the water couldn't get through my third eyelid.

We didn't have towels with us, so we both shook off on the deck around the pool before going back to our room. Jenny was in the shower so we had to wait for her to finish, and since we didn't want to get our bed wet we just stood and dripped on the carpet.

Both of us were getting a bit chilly, 'cause the room had an air cooling machine that blew air in and the buttons were small and flush.

I'd opened my bags to try and find something to poke them with when Jenny came out of the shower and looked at the two of us—I'd found my pen for my journal at the bottom of my bag—and wanted to know why we were both soaking wet and why there was a bra with all of my flight gear.

So I told her how Meghan had put it in my bag so that I could carry it home for her and then I'd forgotten I had it, and Jenny rolled her eyes and said that cleared it up and then she said it looked like Meghan had bigger boobs than she did.

It was nice in the bathroom; all the steam from Jenny's shower was still hanging around, and we didn't have to wait for the water to warm up at all.

Aquamarine wanted to know more about Meghan, so I told her how we were sleeping and showering together and how she was learning to preen my wings and she was teaching me how to cook and how much I liked spending time with her. And I told her about our adventures together, both being on television and how I'd gone horseback riding.

She said that was something she wanted to try, too, so I told her how Meghan had practiced with me before we did and said that I thought that had been a really smart thing to do but I still hadn't been very good at riding a horse because I couldn't get it to go where I wanted it to.

Aquamarine said that she'd been going by the pastures on her way back from the greenhouses and one time she'd even gotten up her courage and when nobody was looking she'd jumped the fence and spent an hour in the pasture with them and she'd gotten in a bit of a dominance fight with one of the mares but the rest of them hadn't been any problem.

We got dried off and when we got back out in the main room Jenny was dressed in her cargo pants again and she was nice and filled up my camelback for me while Aquamarine and I were brushing each other's manes.

Once we were ready, we packed up all our things and put them in the car then checked out of the motel. Jenny drove us to the park and we had to get new fetlock-bands then we went over to the big tent where they were having the pancakes with pirates.

That was a lot of fun because the pirates were really silly. Right after we sat down, one of them took a pancake on the tip of his sword and everyone chased him around the tent until they finally caught him before he could eat it, and another one of them kept trying to put pepper down the barrel of his gun because he said he thought it was gunpowder.

There was a blonde girl who folded up a newspaper-hat for the pancake thief, and she stole his hat and put the newspaper-hat on him instead, and he kept wearing it even though it was too big for him.

Jenny said that she thought the breakfast was meant for children, but I was having fun and so was Aquamarine, and besides there were plenty of seats for everyone.

Before we left they told us that we should watch their morning play which was called Down and Out on the Barbary Coast, and we said that we would. The pepper-pirate said that he was in it.

We were just getting down towards the river when we heard a loud honking, then the bell for the drawbridge started to ring. Since all the ships were already at their docks, we weren't sure what was coming but as it opened I saw a big black lake freighter slowly coming upriver.

Everyone stood and watched as it went by, and it was a good reminder that as big as these ships were, the newer ships were so much larger. It was called Buffalo and it was from Wilmington, Delaware.

You could feel the ground moving a little bit from the pulsing of its engine. And there was a crewman up in the bow, watching where the head of the ship went, or maybe just looking down on the tall ships as he went by.

We lost sight of it when it the next drawbridge upriver closed, and I wondered where it was going. Jenny said it was probably going to Saginaw, and she didn't think that it could go any further up the river than that.

We visited a couple of smaller ships first, which were called the Appledore IV and Appledore V, which both were from Bay City. And right in front of them was another small ship named the When and If, and the woman at the dock told us that it had been built for General George Patton, who had wanted to sail it around the world after World War Two was over. But she said that he never had; he'd died in Europe before he could return home.

Jenny looked at the swords again until the play was about to start, then we sat and watched the play, which was pretty funny. In the end all of them fought with swords until both of the older pirates were defeated, and the younger pirates ran off with their treasure to get married.

We had a snack for lunch at the booths, and got more elephant ears and kettle popcorn and then we took one last look around before crossing over the river to see the last few ships that we hadn't seen yesterday.

Both of them were from Canada; one was called the Playfair and the other was the Pathfinder, and we took a tour of each one of them and then we decided that it was time to go back to Lansing.

On our way out of town, Jenny wanted to stop and take a picture of the city hall, which wasn't very far from where she'd parked. It was a big, grey, stone building with a red roof that looked kinda like a castle, with a clock tower on one end.

We took a different route out of town, crossing over a pair of bridges that joined on an island, and that took us back to the 75 Highway, and from there we reversed our course back home.

We stopped for dinner in a town called Durand, and she found a restaurant called Nick's Hometown Grill, which was really near the railroad tracks and right as we were getting our food, we heard a train horn and Aquamarine and Jenny looked at each other and laughed and said it was just like being back in their apartment.

It was maybe another half hour after we left Durand that we finally got back to East Lansing, and Jenny parked her car in long car-pavilion which she said was called a carport and had been included with their lease. And the bottom floor was all little stores; there was a restaurant and a coffee store and something called Spartan Net which I thought might be a fishing store but Aquamarine said it was for computers instead.

Their room was on the corner, and it had a balcony which looked over a triangle-field between the road and the railroad tracks, and you could also see through the trees a bunch more fields across the tracks and Aquamarine said that those all belonged to Michigan State, and they experimented with crops in them.

The inside was really nice and new, and a lot nicer than my apartment. Everything in the kitchen was sleek and shiny chrome, and they even had a microwave oven. Along the windows, there were tables with lots of plants in them which were all Aquamarine's. She showed me one baby tree that she'd found in a drainage ditch without any leaves and wrapped in an old plastic bag and so she'd dug it up and brought it home to nurse it back to health and then she was going to plant it near the railroad tracks once it got a little bit healthier.

We spent the rest of the evening sitting in the living room and talking. Jenny showed us some pictures on the computer of her working at a blacksmith's forge, which was really neat, and she showed us a twisted knife she'd made for practice. She said it wasn't very good at all and would probably serve better as a tent-peg than a knife, but she was still proud of it because it was the first thing she'd made all by herself.

Aquamarine looked at her Facebook, and Cedric had sent her a picture of him working on a house. He said a friend had taken it, and you could tell it was kind of candid; he was walking away from a big flat truck that was just out of focus, and had a stack of mill-wood on his shoulder.

I asked Aquamarine if she'd written him any letters, and she kinda turned her head away and Jenny leaned over and whispered that they talked on the telephone a couple of hours each week.

And then she had some pictures of her biology experiment, which just looked to me like a shelf of potted plants. But she said that her professor was getting really good data from them.

Aquamarine and Jenny had two different bedrooms and I thought that was kind of odd. She said that Jenny liked it that way, but it did feel kind of lonely sometimes. She'd put her bed up against the wall between the two bedrooms, and she said that helped.

She wanted to know if I ever felt lonely in my apartment, and I told her that I did sometimes but I had lots of birds outside that kept me company, and Angela and David were only a short flight away, plus Meghan came over or I went to her apartment.

My ears perked up as I heard a train, and I went to the window to watch it go by. Aquamarine said that the day after they'd moved in, someone had ignored the lights and gates and tried to get around the train and their car had been completely smashed by it, and the train had sat across the road for three hours until it could go again.

I could still see some ruts at the edge of the triangle-field, and she said that was where it had gotten pushed by the train. She said that the guy in it had survived but that the fire department had to cut the car apart to get him out of it.

She used her computer for a little bit, and I wrote in my journal until it was time for bed, and then the two of us snuggled up together.

Next Chapter: July 11 [Airborne Idiot] Estimated time remaining: 41 Hours, 6 Minutes