battle of the aRRdennes

I know pirates aren't cool anymore. They are sooooo 2003. I mean, I made pirate movies with friends back in high school, which was the last time it was cool. We rode around with a hobie cat attached to a jeep and marooned ourselves on the island in the middle of Lake Maitland. It was epic, not to mention Oscar worthy. Now, one of the original land pirates of the Pirates of Edgewater is currently in the US Navy. About as anti-pirate as you can get.

But avast! I digress.

Last weekend, 13 lucky landlubbers voyaged to the rough seas of the Ardennes, and dressed up as pirates anyway. And here lies the Tale of the 13 Pirates of the Ardennes.

Yo ho, yo ho....abandon all hope, ye who read this...

It all began on a beautiful, not dark, not stormy night. The pirates had been merrily kayaking along a river, accompanied by their pet crocodile. They already had found some treasure, but were quickly running out because they kept stealing it from one another.

This caused a mutiny, which happened when the pirates had docked their boats and were busy drinking some more of their treasure. The mutiny started because all of a sudden, random pirates started dying, one by one! Shiver me timbers, what's a pirate captain to do?

Why, accuse Jing the superdeadly Chinese pirate of murder and make her walk the plank, of course! I mean, she just looked guilty, come on, everyone knew it. The only problem was, she wasn't.

Before Jing could come back from the dead and get her otherworldly revenge, the pirates saw a ghost!

They were surprised because dead men, as it turns out, do tell tales. Really long ones, in fact. But only in French. Also, dead men can't do very much - mostly they just raise their arms on different parts of a castle. And look vaguely like Klansmen.

The pirates were pretty disappointed because they had already hoisted the colors, savvy? They had gotten all ready for an epic pirate battle with the ghost of a Klansman just to see him disappear in a cloud of smoke and fireworks...

"What a no good lily livered scalawag!" the 13 pirates said, vowing to return to the ghostly forest some other weekend and get the vengeance that was rightfully theirs. And drink some more grog. Because it was a pretty sweet weekend.

To be continued?