The seventh incident.
Every year a few of us are volunteers on a bicycle tour put on by the local children's hospital. On the first night, before the actual ride starts, everyone just hangs out, we usually find something entertaining to do like playing cards or something, this year was a little different. There were 6 of us together, and for this one night we all got to stay in a hotel just off I-90. Some friends from the previous year were there and somehow the subject of our cow building adventures came up. Being extremely bored and 100 miles from home, we needed to come up with something to do. The hotel we were staying at was fairly small, two stories, one entrance at the front (with someone at the desk 24 hours) and an exit at the other end of the building. It was about 100 feet off the main road (which out room was facing luckily) that came in from the freeway. The only things around us were 2 gas stations, a 24-hour Denny's-type restaurant, and a truck stop. What to do....

My friend and I started out on a little hunt around the block to see what interesting things we could find. After talking a little bit about our idea we headed back for the hotel to meet up with everyone else.

We had 2 people go around to all the hotel rooms they could and gather extra toilet paper rolls from all the bathrooms. We took up a collection and got a few dollars in change together. He and I took off and went around behind all the gas stations and the truck stop and gathered up all of the scrap cardboard we could find, while some other people went to the store and picked up 2 rolls of duct tape, some scotch tape, a bunch of black markers and a $1.50 fishing knife. When we met back in the hotel room it all began to come together... Got our biggest piece of cardboard and rolled it into a cylinder about 3 feet long and 18 inches in diameter. Took a few more pieces and rolled them up into tubes for legs and a neck. The head was carefully constructed out of various scrap pieces - and we stuck it all together with our duct tape. After the body was completed, we set her up on the table and began wrapping the body and legs with toilet paper. Had to use quite a lot so that it wouldn't tear when we tried to move it. After it was completely covered in TP, we took the black markers and everyone began coloring spots on it (which took awhile on the TP). The tail was made from a frayed strip of cardboard. For the udders, if I remember right, we sent someone over to one of the gas stations and had them ask for a rubber glove :).

Now the question was, how do we get this thing out of the hotel without anyone seeing us? Our room was on the second story, fairly close to the entrance, but we had the people at the front desk to get by. Could go out the back exit, it was close to 2am, but there were still plenty of people roaming the halls. We stripped the sheets off the beds and began tying them together into a sling. Three of us went down out the back door and came around the front under the balcony, while the other three stayed up top and got the cow ready for deployment. The people up top carefully lowered the bovine to us using the sling over the railing. Soon as it was safely at ground level, we took it and ran it out to the road and then returned to our room where the six of us sat out on the balcony and watched.

First we set it out on the far side of the road. There were a lot of trucks coming and going from the truck stop, as well as quite a few state patrol cars, and a few people passing thru for gas. Our cow was getting some attention, enough to make people slow down and take a look, but nothing too worthwhile. We were also having the problem of semis driving by and blowing it over in the ditch. After much debate, I decided it would get more attention if it was in the middle of the road (on the centerline), so we mooved it. That proved to bring much more attention, as some cars would almost come to a complete stop and just look at it, some people would just swerve around it without giving a second thought to it, others would just fly right by at 60 mph. (Must remember, we are out in nowhere, most of there people have probably been on the road for a few hours). What I found interesting was the number of patrol cars that drove right by it, and the fact that none of them payed any attention to the large object standing in the middle of the road. After another big rig drove by, it blew over and was laying right in the middle of a lane. Cars were going all over trying to avoid the poor cow, off onto the shoulder and into the other lane. No one, however, was stopping to help it! Finally - a small red wagon with two women in it comes driving down the road, on their way back to the highway. They spot the cow, laying in the other lane and begin to slow. They pull up, one of them gets out and walks over to it. She starts to pick it up and looks at the thing, and someone behind me starts yelling "hey!! that's our cow!!" ... So, the poor lady in the road starts looking around, spots us up no the balcony at the hotel and immediately runs to the back of her car and scrables to get the tailgate open. She grabs the cow, stuffs it in the back and drives off. I wonder how far they had to home and what they did with it :).

Moral of the story is.......Well, there isn't one, but it's a pretty bizarre example of what can be done when you're stuck in a hotel with a bunch of people and nothing to do. There's no wrong place to build a cow :).