When I was at the Thanksgiving dinner, I met a guy who was recently thrown out by his wife. Not that that is part of this story, but he told me of a friend of his, a guy who recently became a doctor. Right after he finished his residency, he decided to take two years to stroll around India. Which is a good idea, especially if you don't really want to be a doctor.

Never mind that he had 189,000 dollars in debt. He decided to buy a camel. I don't know much about camels, but I hear they are difficult to train, and apparently this camel has been no exception, throwing him, spitting on him (camels are very big on spitting) and generally being a nusiance. So this doctor with a camel got himself some local lady who is a camel trainer, and now he walks around rural India pulling a camel on a rope, with a lady perched on the hump, who controls it for him. I mention all this because I was just talking to Adam, who, after asking what I did with my weekend, told me that he spent his weekend in Baja, in a dune buggy, racing for a thousand miles in something called the Baja 1000.

To be clear, it's not that I wish I were in India, or in a dune buggy, where apparently, the local Mexicans throw rocks at you and set wires to cut your head off, but there is something to be said for a life lived where you periodically go such places. At least that is how it sounds to my relatively sedentary ears. The dune buggy finished the race with a finger, a human finger, stuck in the front grill, a result of the fact that the local mexicans try and touch the cars as they speed by, and I guess someone touched it and lost a finger.

There is a lot of resentment between the locals and the racers, because a few years ago a mexican villager was killed and they just left him where he was hit, either because they didn't see him or didn't care. But now the race, which doesn't make much accomodation for the locals, is kind of at odds with the local population and people throw stuff at the drivers, which is made easier by the fact that the dune buggies have nothing but roll bars for roofs and no windshields.