More Memories

+ = ???

Still on the topic of reunion memories... one of my favorites:

A few years back, we were sitting around the campfire at reunion and somehow it came up that if you put a full can of soda (unopened) in a fire, it will explode. My grandma (in her early 70s at the time) was astonished by this, and suddenly declared that we had to try it!

This was mostly adults in this group... most of the kids were not around. But we all decided that we needed to try exploding soda in the campfire. So we took a can of soda and chucked it into the fire. Then we were all smart enough to move back quite a ways. After a few minutes of waiting, sure enough, the can exploded! It was a loud bang, and the can shot into the air!

We were all amazed at the big reaction, and decided we needed to do it again. Grandma was especially egging us on - she loved it! We probably went through most of a couple of 6-packs of soda because we thought it was so funny. Finally, we'd exploded enough cans of soda that the liquid was putting out the fire. So we decided it was time to put out the fire for real and go to bed.

It wasn't until the next morning that we went out to the fire pit and discovered that the exploding cans of soda had shot soda everywhere around the fire pit. And while we had been smart enough to move ourselves back away from the campfire, no one had thought to move the camp chairs - they were all covered in sticky soda residue! That took a lot of clean-up... especially at a campground with no running water.

One of my favorite memories of reunion - and the best part is that my 70+ grandma was the ringleader in the whole thing!