Yes, it’s always something.

After our guide got us all calmed down with the shrunken head demonstration, he proposed that we try to balance an egg on a nail on the equator.

Now this was a day when I wished I were better at cutting my losses. I think a gremlin high-jacked my brain momentarily because I found myself absolutely incapable of giving up on the egg-on-a-nail-on-theequator challenge until I had succeeded and made one stand on its head.

Myrtle still has not forgiven me for that day.

For some reason known only to the gods who like to laugh at us, my eggs would simply not stand upright, just kept falling over like drunken sailors. That made me really mad because the drunken sailor’s gig was supposed to be in Myrtle’s court.

As I kept trying and trying, getting more and more frustrated, I took to grasping the eggs harder, which, as you can guess, did not bode well for the health of the eggs.

In short order I had broken seven, and the path was strewn with accusatory yolk eyes.

I kept asking the outpost attendant to bring me more eggs, which I went through in impressively short order.

Eventually our guide started herding our group toward the bus, expecting all of us to follow.

But I was NOT going to leave Ecuador without balancing an egg on a nail on the equator. I kept at it.

Finally, Myrtle grabbed at my shirt and tried to pull me away, with the unfortunate result that she slipped on all those broken eggs and fell into them with a yelp.

Just as she landed, I finally got that egg balanced, and I leaped up singing “Glory, glory hallelujah! I DID it!!!”

Myrtle was not impressed, and she viewed my jubilation with a very jaundiced eye. In fact, dear reader, when she looked up at me, I did step back a bit because it looked like there was fire spitting out of her eyes. Right at me!

She had to put both hands down into the yolkey mess to lift herself out of it, and I saw with some hilarity, which you must give me credit for hiding, that her khaki behind was an artistic mosaic of yellow yolk and glistening raw egg white.

Then I was aware that our bus had fired up, with its usual musical farting, and I yelled at Myrtle to “Come on, hurry, our bus is leaving.”

I was careful not to grab her hand, though, which she was shaking vigorously as though her hands were afflicted with fire ants, all the while trying to run to the bus.

Then I became aware that we were being pursued urgently by the attendant, who kept shouting something in Spanish that I could not hear because Myrtle kept muttering, “I am going to kill you, I am going to kill you.”

It was a very close three-way race as Myrtle and the attendant, and I all reached the bus at the same time. I tried to sneak past the guide to quickly mount the steps, but the attendant grabbed my pant leg, thereby almost tripping me as he kept yelling something to our guide.

Well, it turns out that I had broken an impressive 25 eggs, and the price of eggs being temporarily high do to a disease that hit the flocks, which the attendant vociferously blamed on bad Gringo germs, it turned out he wanted me to pay him some insane amount of sucres, the equivalent of about $150 dollars, the balance going to pay for the cleaning of the dirt path and the acquiring of special smooth dirt so that stupid Gringos could actually balance that damned egg. Well!

But wait! The sucre had gone out in 2000, replaced by the U.S. dollar.

However, it seems the owner knew that some Gringos were buying up hundreds of dollars’ worth of old sucres because they could sell them as souvenirs back home and make a tidy profit. The going rate was about 800,000 sucres for $200 dollars and the owner wanted the resultant profit for himself.

But our guide finally convinced the attendant that I did not have any sucres, and the guide then had to front me the $150 until I could get to an ATM.

None of this endeared me to our guide.

He had heard that the owner of the Museum center was known to slash bus tires when things did not go his way. It turns out the owner was also the mayor and the judge in that town.

When our lumbering bus finally got back to our hotel an hour or so later, all the eggs on Myrtle’s pants had dried and she was stuck to the bus seat.

And so, helpful as I always try to be, I heroically tried to assist by yanking her out of her seat. As you probably already guessed, the seat of her pants wanted to remain on the bus seat and obligingly tore free. She exited the bus trying in vain to hold up a stiff flap so that all and sundry could not get a good glimpse of her very pretty, I did notice, Victoria Secret underwear.

But all my solicitude did not endear me to Myrtle, unfortunately, and so now I was in the doghouse with pretty much everybody.

The next day I did redeem myself a little when we took that old bus up to the Cloud Forest near Quito. It was a pretty awful trip, I have to tell you.