The Neolithic Era

I expect to feel somewhat like a man when I'm backpacking.  Muddy boots, no hair dryer, infrequent shaving (I'm not afraid to admit it).  Not to mention my 50-ton pack makes me stomp around all squatty-like, as if I were a pro weight-lifter.  Sometimes, however, I feel more like a cave man.  I can do the whole no-phone thing.  In fact, I relish that.  Brings me back to the golden years when I didn't have a cell phone to make various arrangements.  If you say you'll meet at the playground, you'll be there.  If your mom forgets to pick you up from piano lessons, you just walk home and if you're lucky she'll see you somewhere along the road.  Simple as that.  But things like watches are nice to have.  And knives.  I'm crap at telling time by the sun's placement in the sky.  And I can't be bothered to fashion a razor out of a rock to slice a piece of cheese.

Paragliding.  It was heaven.

Matt and I found ourselves in a foreign country with no way to tell time and no way to cut cheese (tee hee).  Poor planning on my behalf.  We tried to see how long we could last..... 48 hours is all.  And to add to the cave man persona, we resorted to a lot of grunting, as we did not speak the native German language.  

How oddly convenient that Switzerland's primary exports are knives and watches!  And cuckoo clocks.  But I couldn't find any sort of intrinsic value in those, and I definitely don't need one to survive.  Bear Grylls probably would have used the cuckoo mechanism to fake a mating call to the wild cuckoos of Zimbabwe, and then he would fry their eggs over a hot sandstone and take the little Swiss yodler figurines and somehow squeeze water out of them and drink that.  But I haven't watched enough Man Vs. Wild to call myself that advanced yet.  Ergo, our first souvenirs: