elfs | Camping: Monday, and it's just a Drive.

Home away from home.

For the first time in nearly twenty years, Omaha and I went camping by ourselves, without the children. Yamaraashi-chan is in her 20s now, lives on her own in a small apartment in Seattle, and can legally drink! Kouryou-chan is eighteen, has her own car and her own friends, and while she still lives with us she begged off and said she wished to have the house to herself for a week.

So Omaha and I made checklists and schedules, spending Sunday cataloging and counting the supplies to make sure we had enough, and a quick trip to the sporting goods store for a few extras. When Monday arrived the car was mostly packed; we had only to go get some dry ice for the cooler, then the food, then the bulk ice. After breakfast and gasoline, we were on the road.

I had had a brilliant idea of stopping by the local second-hand store and buying a few children's soft-bodied lunchboxes, filling them with dry ice, in order to slow the heat transfer and make the whole thing last longer without creating an iceberg at the bottom of the cooler. That had happened last year and at some point we'd had to chip out the meat with a tent stake. While I didn't find any lunchboxes, I did find a child's exercise mat that was exactly the same size as the cooler, and padded with enough foam to provide the insulation I desired. It worked perfectly.

We drove north, our destination the Clear Creek Campground in the Mount Baker – Snoqualmie National Forest. We stopped for our traditional Burger King lunch, and drove on through quiet roads. The West Coast is on fire again, and a pall of woodsmoke from fires raging in eastern Washington, California, Oregon, and Canada colored the sun a dull orange. Visibility was poor.

We reached the campsite at about 4pm, and immediately set up camp. And then I took a nap. I'm not sure why; it wasn't as if I'd slept poorly the night before. But I still needed sleep, and Omaha let me get about an hour.

The campsite was beautiful, right along the Sauk River. Omaha and I trekked out with our new gravity filter and filled our five-gallon water bucket, and the gravity filter worked amazingly well. We had fun watching it fill the bucket while we sat and skipped stones across a side-stream.

We completely skipped dinner, too. We had little meal bars instead, but that's not a meal. We were still full from the very American lunch. We played a round of Unexploded Cow and then headed to bed. To our horror, we forgot our pillows and headlamps. The headlamps we can live without; we had plenty of alternative light sources. The pillows, well... we made do with clean laundry bundled into the sleepsack carry bags, but those are poor substitutes.

I guess we'll live.