That Stinky Crab

Last night I went out to eat with a good friend and I ate somewhere I'd never eaten before: Red Lobster.
I am going on record as saying that it was most delicious. And fulfilling. And scrumptious.
I am not going on record as saying it was fattening, because I am in denial. And I did have a salad...

...in addition to a small-ish bowl of clam chowder, a largish plate of shrimp nachos that we shared, a large plate of shrimp & scallops in linguine with an alfredo sauce, and key lime pie (which I am eating now).

All the seafood, in addition to the live lobsters swimming (do they swim or just crawl about?) in the tank, reminded me of Rhode Island and the Horseshoe Crab.

One of the mornings when we were on vacation there, Leo and I went for a walk before anyone else had disrupted the water-smoothed sand with their footprints.

Well, almost no one.

No one, except this one large horseshoe crab, who looked very similar to this one:

This was an amazing find for us. I mean, we'd been collecting various seashells, but this, this was a crab! Albeit it was a dead crab, and we felt no remorse in removing it from the seashore. I just had to show all the kids what we'd found.

So, nonchalantly we strolled up the beach, now starting to have other morning walkers observing us carrying a large, awkward crab. We felt a little strange, so Leo took off his shirt, wrapped up the crab in it and we carried it back that way.

As if that didn't look at all strange.

Back at the house, we showed everybody our treasure, and we all checked him out and decided we would set him out in the yard to dry.

Big mistake.

The underside of a horseshoe crab has a lot of crab in it with hairy legs that make you think of a tarantula. Like this:

Well, if you ever wonder what a rotting crab smells like. . .don't.

A couple of days in the HOT sun with do quite a number on the crab.






The morning we were  loading up the van to head home, we had the front door open to the cottage, and this odd smell came wafting through the door. I went outside to investigate and as I rounded the corner of the house, it was like visible waves of incredible stink assailed my senses.

Clapping my hands over my mouth and nose, I frantically looked for the source of the horrendous odor.
There was Leo, in the yard, garden hose in hand, holding out an empty shell as he sprayed it. Using a kitchen knife, he had gutted out the rotted parts and was cleaning the shell so we could take it home.

As I am taking in the sight, through watering eyes, Aaron walked by and gagged. Then a jogger came by and says "Good morning." Whether or not he smelled it, I don't know, but I think he ran away much, much faster than he'd approached the house. The whole neighborhood reeked.

Oh, I really appreciated the effort it took to clean out that shell. Really, I did! BUT, I couldn't let it travel home with us. It smelled so incredibly awful that even if we put it on top of the van, I think we still would've smelled it. So, Leo put it in a bag, carried it back to a little wooded area on the path to the beach and tossed it out there.

I really pity whoever walked that path on that day.

The moral of the story: There are things in life that stink, and then there are things in life that REALLY STINK!

However, Red Lobster is not one of those things, but I can tell you that ordering crab wasn't even an option.

Love,
Dianne