Camping, day 6

[elfs]

Spider's hammock, with dew

Breakfast was granola, and I boiled some eggs to prepare for lunch. Kouryou-chan tried to wear the same clothes she had worn the day before. She insisted that the pants were clean, so Omaha had me roll through the photographs to prove to Kouryou-chan that, yes indeed, she had worn those pants already. Darn photographic evidence. After the eggs had cooled in the river Omaha and the girls set up an assembly line to make the sandwiches while I washed the dishes.

We've got neighbors suddenly. Family of four, parents that have that muscled biker look to them. Rough trade.

Yamaraashi-chan insisted on wearing a tied-die bellyshirt that covered little more than a bikini top so Omaha made sure she was carrying a spare t-shirt in case it turned cool.

We drove up a narrow service forest road, the kind that really ought to be attempted only by jeeps and heavy trucks. We stopped at a vaguely wider spot in a heavily wooded area at an unmarked trail Omaha insisted was the one we wanted. I was dubious, but she insisted, and we headed off.

Flowers along the trail.

The hike was gorgeous. We saw all manners of flowers and madrona trees along the path. There were also these peculiar aluminum markers on trees all along the path with notes like "17+00" and "6+47". We couldn't figure out what they meant, but when they got to zero we were at an old bridge across the Elk River that had been smashed in last year's flooding and was now uncrossable. We walked on to Elk Lake, where we found two guys drinking beer fishing quietly. After we reached the west end of Elk Lake we concluded that there was no way down to the lake itself for swimming or anything like that, so we had lunch and then turned back around for home. The hike back was easy, mostly downhill, and the girls were strong troopers about it. Kouryou-chan's ankle was no longer bothering her.

We got back to the campsite and shared watermelon, then Omaha went for a nap. I sat back and finished Trial of Flowers, which was a lot slower reading than the popcorn of Hammer of Daemons. The girls ran around. Our neighbors... drank. And drank and drank and drank. The adults finished one case and started in on another. They had brought all the scrap wood from their workshop and were destroying it in a massive fire in the fire ring. It reached seven, eight feet high, which would have steamed a ranger if he'd seen it.

"Daddy, make a funny face!"

We made tacos for dinner, but Kouryou-chan wouldn't eat them and instead made a hot-dog. Afterward, we roasted marshmallows. Yamaraashi-chan did not set herself on fire this time. We played cards until it was too dark to tell the difference between blue and green. The neighbors played country music, but they at least turned it off promptly at ten.