Report from Base Camp 1

A million years ago I had to read a book called "The Ascent of Everest" by John Hunt, the long-mostly-forgotten leader of the expedition to climb Everest.  I must say I enjoyed it a hell of a lot more than "The Catcher in the Rye".  It was written long before climbing Everest became a case of slipping on your Gortex undies, grabbing a couple of titanium oxygen bottles and off you go.  And so it was when I parked by the lower lake at Biltmore House yesterday, ready to plan my assault on the Everest that leads up to the house, maybe 300 feet above me.  I've done this climb - OK, hike - many times: sometimes on foot and more frequently by bike.  But right now, walking a mile and a bit on the flat is bloody hard work.  So this was more an expedition planning trip than the full monty.
Kudos to the folks at Biltmore for upgrading the path - there was one real nasty bit where the path was about 6" wide and much higher on one side than on the other so if you rode your bike up it and the pedal happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, you wound up wearing your bike.  That bit is now fresh gravel and 2 metres wide - loogzuree!
The path reverts to its former glory further up and that's as far as I got this trip.  I have christened it "Base Camp One" and, as I didn't have a Union Jack with me, I spat on it to mark the spot.  Any passing bloodhound will appreciate it.  Sam has a late start for school next Tuesday so I will return to knock the bastard off.
Today was meant to be unexciting - Susan is away until tomorrow at a teachers' symposium in South Carolina so I was most certainly not going to do anything potentially risky.  So I walked on the treadmill, stopping after a pathetic 9 minutes when my right leg started to hurt.  Pottered around at my desk for a while.  Had a shower - risky business.  Looking in the mirror after I'd got dressed, I noticed that the sore spot on my neck had what looked like a scab on it.  Always delighting in fiddling with such things, I pulled it off, not particularly painfully.  It had little black fibres sticking out at one end.  That's it on the right - Nick the Tick.  They have a nasty reputation around these parts for spreading Lyme disease which I really don't fancy.  So I called the doctor - closed for lunch.  So I emailed Wake Forest and then phoned Cancer Care of WNC who said "Call Wake Forest".  By which time my doctor was back from lunch.  "Can you get here at 4:30?"  Absolutely.  Meanwhile Wake Forest sent a prescription to our local CVS who phoned me within minutes to say it was ready.  At 4 o'clock, I popped Nick the Tick into an old pill pot, picked up my prescription from CVS and trotted off to the doc.  My doc doesn't work Thursday's so one of the other docs dug the remaining bits of Nick out of my neck (I'll do without the numbing shot, thanks) and, at Wake Forest's request, had another armful of blood sent off to check for Lyme disease. The bad news is that, if it's positive, this could be really nasty.  The good news is, this is the wrong kind of tick for Lyme disease - it's carried by deer ticks and this is a dog tick, so called because they're found on cows.  I don't recall getting my neck anywhere near either a cow or a dog in the last year but I will be avoiding both even more than usual in future.